Events slowing down site

[sophia woodward]

Hi,

About a week ago (March 28) our events started to load very slowly or to not load at all. We had not made any recent changes and had not seen this type of behaviour before.

We updated all of our themes, plugins and core, hoping that would fix the problem. But it did not.

We also upgraded our hosting plan after contacting our host to increase our memory limit and add a CDN. This helped generally–all of our pages are running faster. But any page with calendar content still runs slower than usual and events pages go down intermittently (especially the individual events pages).

We have not had this problem on our development site and so our conflict testing did not give us any useful information.

Please let us know if you need more information.

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PLEASE LEAVE FOR SUPPORT
Reporting the same issue as: https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/single-event-pages-loading-slow/

[sophia woodward]

This reply is private.

[Sky]

Sophia,

I’m sorry to hear that you’re having issues with the performance on your site. I will try to help figure out if this is being caused by one of our plugins.

Can you tell me about your development site? Is it running the same theme and plugins? Are the versions up to date in both environments? Is the content roughly the same as on the live site?

This information will help us figure out how to proceed in troubleshooting.

Thanks,
Sky

[sophia woodward]

The development site is roughly the same but not a 100% copy of the live website (its never 100%). The live website is also hosted and the dev website is in-house. Just on the environment itself is already different but plugin wise, they are roughly the same. We already contacted our hosting vendor and they confirmed that we have enough resources to accommodate the traffic, environment and database performance.
At this point, the issue is not only its loading really slow, we’re also having issues not seeing the list of the events in the calendar page. Every part of our website is working fine and loading as per normal, this is one part of our website that gets most traffic and yet its the only one we are having problems and it just really started 2 weeks ago.

If I give a list of Active plugins that we have in our site, would that possibly help you point which plugin could possibly affecting the Events Calendar plugin? Also, is there a setting that you would recommend that we can use to optimize its performance?

[Sky]

Hi Sophia,

To find out if another plugin is conflicting with the Events Calendar, even if it’s related to the hosting environment, I would recommend the following course of action.

Install the WP Staging plugin and create a staging site from your live site. This will make an exact copy of the live site that you can test on without disrupting the experience for your users. Disable all of the plugins besides the Events Calendar, Filterbar and Pro. Switch to the Twenty Seventeen theme. Does this change how things are loading and working? If so, enable plugins one at a time and check to see if anything changed, until you identify the culprit.

For more information on this process, see our Testing For Conflicts Guide.

Let me know how that goes.

Thanks,
Sky

[sophia woodward]

This reply is private.

[Sky]

Sophia,

Thanks for providing the detailed information.

Can you enable the staging site to be viewed without login? In the WP Staging settings, check the “Disable admin authorization” setting. I would like to see the performance issues in the context of having the Twenty Seventeen theme enabled and other plugins disabled.

Thanks,
Sky

[sophia woodward]

Still the same issue, the page still took almost 20 sec to load just one Event.

[sophia woodward]

This reply is private.

[Sky]

Sophia,

Thanks for doing that. I can hardly get any of the event pages to load at all. The few times I did get them to load, I noticed an error in the console from some javascript that seems to be in one of the footer widgets? Specifically, the Widget with the “Resources:” list. Can you try removing this script from the widget content to see if it changes anything?

Thanks,
Sky

[sophia woodward]

Hi,

That script has been removed from the footer–it was from an old menu that is not used on the live site. It must have been reactivated when we deactivated all of our plugins and reverted the theme.

Either way, removing the script does not seem to have had any effect.

Is there anything else we can check?

[Sky]

Sophia,

Thanks for trying that.

I asked around about performance issues, and one thing that was mentioned is that things can get slow if there’s a large number of events. However, this would likely happen over time, and it seems like your issues started more suddenly. In any case, you can try removing past events to lessen the load on the database. There is a new setting in Events ‣ Settings ‣ General: “Permanently delete events older than…” that lets you control how long past events are retained.

Other than that, you can read this knowledgebase article regarding performance when using our plugins.

I believe there is something else going on, as the events are just not loading for me most of the time. Once I can get the page to load, if I try to reload it with developer tools open to see what’s taking so long to load, it just loads right up fast as the rest of the site.

We have not seen any other cases like this, so there must be something unique with your hosting or site configuration that is just not playing nice with our plugin for some reason.

That being said, can you tell me how many events in total you have on your site? And are many of the recurring events?

Thanks,
Sky

[sophia woodward]

Hi,

We currently have 5,711 published, 289 trashed and 340 ignored.

We did think the number of events could be an issue. However, when we try to activate the new deletion feature the settings page times out before it can complete the task and only about 10 events get removed.

We manually tried to remove some events in the dashboard but this was a pretty tedious task as we would often get time outs trying to manually delete 10 events. We deleted about 1,500 events before we stopped trying to do it manually and opened this ticket.

Interestingly, we deleted the 340 “ignored” events a week ago but they seem to have recreated themselves. Does this raise any flags?

Could 5,000 events enough to cause these types of issues?

[sophia woodward]

And we don’t have any recurring events.

[Sky]

Sophia,

It’s possible that that number of events could slow things down. It depends on your hosting, how many other types of posts, and many other factors.

Let’s try cleaning up the old events and see if that will make any difference. If your host is not able to handle the requests during the delete process, we can try reducing the number that get processed at a time. Hopefully, this will allow it to keep going without timing out.

Try adding this snippet to your child theme’s functions.php.


add_filter( 'tribe_events_delete_old_events_sql', function( $sql ) {
if ( false !== stripos( $sql, 'LIMIT' ) ) {
return $sql;
}
return $sql . ' LIMIT 10 ';
} );


Then run the clean up again and see if it works now. It may take a little longer, but hopefully this prevents it from timing out.

Let me know how that goes.

Thanks,
Sky

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