Slow Tags and UI - any pointers welcomed!

Hi All,

Hope everyone is well and safe during these challenging times, makes my server issues seem small in the scale of things but now more than ever need to pay the rent!

I was hoping someone might give me a few pointers;

Basically the tags on our websites started to really slow down due to the dramatic increase in website traffic across all sites (2M page views in 3 days up from < 100k !!) . Firstly i noticed that the Web server CPU’s were at maximum utilization on our EC2 instance so i increased the number of cores on the server which solved the problem.

However a few days later, I was running into similar speed issues (nothing crashes, just very slow) but the web server was only running at 60% capacity which makes me think this is a config issue and its where my knowledge falls short

Does anyone have any pointers as to where I can start? i’m thinking its a config issue on our php.ini - any or places to check?

For a start my php memory_limit is 128M seems small? any other variables to look at?

PHP version 7.2.7
MySql 5.6
We have a dedicated webserver and a dedicated DB server. (we are looking at scaling this horizontally in light of this boom)

Any help greatly welcomed.

Many Thanks and stay safe all
Steve