www-data ownership of wordpress wp-content/uploads folder makes back-end VERY slow?

Question

I've noticed that when I change wp-content/uploads to www-data ownership recursively, the back-end of the site takes 10-20 seconds to load every page, and tremendously high CPU spikes observing my server.

The problem is, this folder needs to be owned by www-data in order for me to be able to upload media to posts.

Why does this happen on this particular folder only?? If I go into the folder and change ownership of each folder inside, the back-end loads perfectly speedily. It's the uploads folder itself that seems to be the trouble.

Answer 1

Try opening up your terminal/CLI and running top. You should see process and memory allocation broken down by user. If there are processes under the www-data user that are hogging up all your resources, that's an indication of the source of the problem. From there, you can research why a specific process is requiring large amounts of resources, try restarting processes, etc.

Hope this helps!