Community Events Submit Form is Really Slow & "Are You Sure You Want To Do This?

[Steve]

Working on a site with CE installed. They have been having a number of issues with the CE plugin submissions. Frontend users report intermittent issues submitting new events. One sent a screenshot of the error they received.

I tested the form a bit and noticed it was really slow to load the confirmation screen. About 10 seconds or so.

Tracking slow queries, I found the following:

Slow Actions
Action or Filter

Callbacks Calls Per Call Total
4 1 21291.97ms 21291.97ms

parse_request

WP_Router::parse_request
rest_api_loaded
Tribe__Events__Aggregator::action_endpoint_parse_request
Debug_Bar_Slow_Actions::time_stop

We have been working on performance improvements to the site. The frontend calendar works a lot better now. Clearly something is up with this aspect.

Some thoughts: we have a lot of venues and a lot of organizers.

Nothing to report via debug or error logs. I wasn’t able to get much out of the calendar debug mode or logs, I could only find this in debug log:

[12-Mar-2018 23:53:02 UTC] the-events-calendar/common – Log: Initializing Tribe Events on Mar, 12th at 11:03:02 pm

Thanks for any insight on this issue.

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Steve,

Thanks so much for reaching out!

As a first step, please have a look at our Performance Considerations and see if there is anything you can adjust in order to help your site run better:

https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/performance-considerations/

After that, you may be interested in caching, so take a look at this article:  https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/caching-basics/

In addition, you can check out some of the solutions provided in this forum post:

https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/decreasing-loading-time-for-big-amount-of-events/

I would also recommend looking into some of the plugins in this blog post, especially Query Monitor, as they may be able to help you pinpoint where site slowness may be occurring:

https://theeventscalendar.com/favorite-developer-plugins/

Let me know how it goes and if you need any further assistance on this topic!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Steve]

Thanks for the reply. I have reviewed most of these already as part of the performance work we are doing on the site. What I’m looking for from support is insight into why specifically in the context of community events submissions they (1) take a long time (2) sometimes fail.

Caching is already setup and we have followed the suggestions found in the resources above. The frontend display of events is doing a lot better now. However, the community submitted events continue to drag.

I provided information from debug slow queries above. Is there further information I can provide to assist support in helping us understand how to improve specifically the community events submissions? Thanks!

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for that information.  You mentioned that you have a lot of venues and organizers.  One thing that you can do is to Merge Duplicates under Events Settings < General.

Also, are you customizing the REST API?  It seems that the slow query you provided is not related to Community Events, but rather Event Aggregator.

Let me know your thoughts!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Steve]

I’ve attached more info from query monitor. We are not doing anything to/with REST API.

I will look into merging data.

Interestingly enough, we are not running Event Agg on this site. I’m not sure why it’s popping up in the reports.

[Steve]

Looking into the EA thing.. I found this call–

Tribe__Events__Aggregator->setup_notices()
wp-content/plugins/the-events-calendar/src/Tribe/Aggregator.php:110

This site has been running TEC for many years, perhaps a vestige of an older version?

I merged duplicates, no noticeable gain in performance unfortunately.

Any other suggestions you might have would be appreciated. Thanks!

[Jaime Marchwinski]

Hi Steve,

It looks like you do have a valid license to Event Aggregator, which was just (perhaps auto-)renewed a few days ago.

Is this something that you are currently using?

Also, can you update Events Calendar PRO to the most recent version (4.4.24.2) and see if that helps as well?

Let me know how that goes!

 

Thanks,

Jaime

[Steve]

I do have the EA license but we are not using it on this site. It may have been used previously back in the day but isn’t a plugin we have currently on the site as far as I can tell.

[Barry]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for all the detailed notes.

Using Query Monitor and other similar tools you will certainly see references to Event Aggregator but, if your license key has not been added to your site, we can safely discount them. Those function calls should “bail out” very quickly indeed under those conditions with no appreciable impact on performance.

Some thoughts: we have a lot of venues and a lot of organizers.

Can you tell us how many events, venues and organizers are currently in the database? 21 seconds for the submission page to reload suggests that either site resources may be struggling given the amount of data that’s in place, and/or there could be additional but unnecessary HTTP requests further slowing things down.

Could you share your up-to-date system information and can you also let me know if you have a staging site available (if so, does it have the approximately the same range of data as your live site and do you see the same problem there, too)?

Thanks!

[Steve]

This is an 8gb multi core VPS, there should be plenty of resources. This is the only page giving us trouble at this point.

I want to add that sporadically user report they cannot add events and receive a “Are you sure you want to do this?” error message with no way to proceed. I have tried the suggestions on other threads to that message to no avail.

511 Organizers
545 Venues
2600 published events

I’ll include the system report in the next post.

[Steve]

This reply is private.

[Steve]

Copy of error.

[Steve]

This reply is private.

[Barry]

Regarding the “Are you sure you want to do this?” message, do you find this can still be reproduced with the caching plugin disabled? Does it primarily impact unauthenticated users, or can you also replicate while logged in?

For the performance issues when submitting new events through the Community Events submission form: can you confirm if you have a testing or staging site available and does the same problem with performance occur there, if you disable all other themes and activate a default, unmodified theme? To make this a ‘fair’ test, you could potentially copy across your exist post and postmeta data.

[Steve]

Caching does not seem to impact the occurrences, at least during testing. When I have reproduced this error it was with caching disabled (I also have WP Fastest Cache set to ignore specifically the community events submission page). We don’t have any other caching layers. I am generally testing in a different browser as a non logged-in user.

We don’t have a staging site setup currently. However, we could use the Health Check plugin and run in testing mode.

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