Calendar & Calendar Widget Load Extremely Slow

[Victoria]

Hi – I’m Kathie’s web developer, Dorian, (signed in via a different account). We’re unable to use the staging site at WPEngine because it says she’s out of installs, since the API Key is tied to one specific site. Which is unfortunate, but beside the point, I guess.

I just updated the plugin to version 3.0.2 and 3.0.4, and cleared all caches. The load time of the calendar page is 23.72 seconds, according to Pingdom’s website speed test:
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/hKz6H/http://socalkidssandiego.com/events/

I’m going to disable plugins now and see if that makes a difference, but I wanted to verify that it’s not just her computer having the problem.

[Victoria]

After disabling all other plugins and clearing the cache again (including the CDN cache), the new load time for the calendar page is 26.45s. In contrast, other pages on her site (Kathleen = Kathie) load very quickly:
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/ekyD5d/http://socalkidssandiego.com/about-me/about-me/ 1.69s
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/bkInMW/http://socalkidssandiego.com/coupons/local-coupons/ 1.76s
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/ACSDa/http://socalkidssandiego.com/links/ 4.63s

Weirdly, when I reactivated all of the other plugins, the site speed decreased significantly on the Events page – 7.58s.

I installed the Events Calendar Housekeeping plugin and there are 4741 events that are 6 months old or more. It looks like there’s a lag between setting that up and it actually doing a sweep of the old events. Kathleen or I will come back and update this thread to let everyone know if that made a difference, as well.

[Jonah]

Hi Victoria,

Thanks for all this and the update. On the API key, there is no limitation with this to using the plugin, only being able to run auto updates. So the site should still work fine…

Those are some very strange results… Please let us know what you find after clearing out all the old events.

Thanks,
Jonah

[Victoria]

Sorry – I thought Kathleen had already replied to this. Nothing has improved since trying the changes I’d listed. The Events Calendar Housekeeping plugin will only delete 100 events per day (it runs once a day, maximum of 100 events) and so it will be a few weeks before it’s cleaned out all of the “expired” events. Having said that, I don’t think this is the problem because we weren’t having this issue with site speed before the most recent update.

Right now, the events page takes 60 seconds to load. Both Kathleen and I have run tests over the last couple of days using pingdom’s site speed test and we get the same result. It makes the calendar essentially unusable for a significant number of site visitors, and the calendar is the primary purpose of the site.

[Rob]

Hey Victoria. Jonah’s actually left the team as of last Friday, but I’m going through to catch up on his threads and wanted to take point on this one to drive it home for you. My apologies for the delay in getting you a reply so far.

Quick request: we released a minor batch of updates that changed how events load and MySQL’s behavior a bit, just earlier today. These were Events 3.0.3 and PRO 3.0.5. Any chance you’ve been able to apply those updates to see if they improve the load time?

[Samuel]

Hello Victoria. Sorry again for the issues you are facing. We are aware of inefficient queries being executed for month view and our php devs have this as a top priority issue now. We are targeting improvements to the queries in the coming release(s) to help with calendars that have a large numbers of events. Thanks for your patience as we take time to get the new code rolled out in a solid way.

In my tests of your system i can see that after caching calendar pages load for me in around 3 seconds, while ajax requests on grid view can take up to 22 seconds.

[Harold]

@rob
Is this update ready for WP3.6 update? I have the same loading time problems. In cache the first month page seems to load oke. But as soon as I click for next month it takes for ever. http://www.nederweert24.nl/events/

[Samuel]

Hey Harold. The update that was released does not yet address the core query issues for gridview we are working on now. In regards to wp3.6 we are doing a full compat run for events now, with no glaring issues currently coming to light. We will keep this and pertinent threads updated with our progress as soon as there is something to report. This is of top priority to us and we again apologize for the current inconvenience for large systems on month view.

[Harold]

Samuel, update to wp3.6 works on my site and no problems with Event calendar :).
Still the problem with loading time 🙂
The Foto view on mobiel (jetpack) is oké but the month view not. Not sure if you have seen this.
Tanks for support already

[Rob]

Thanks again for confirming, Harold. We do indeed have intended improvements coming in the next release for the broader issue Samuel mentioned, and have had reports of the Jetpack conflict as well. We are looking at those for a subsequent release – but if you’ve not logged a separate thread for that issue I would encourage doing so as well.

Thanks to everyone for the heads up and for their patience so far.

[Author]

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