Help with back end speed

[Emily Tarrant]

Hi guys

We’ve been running a website using the Events Calendar plugins for a couple of years now. It’s currently got 605 events (individual events not recurring) and we’re finding that editing events in the back end is painfully slow.

Could you talk me through what I can do to help speed this up please? I’ve been keeping the plugins up-to-date and clearing out old events as much as I can, but still the site has serious speed issues. I would be grateful for your help with this.

Many thanks, Emily

[Cliff]

Hi, Emily. Thanks for using our plugin suite.

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

Are the 605 events upcoming within this calendar year?

[Emily Tarrant]

Thanks Cliff, the events go from June 2017 to December 2018. I’ve been clearing past events manually, but I see from the link you’ve given that there are some settings to automate that. I’ve set it to:
move to trash after 3 months
permanently delete after 1 yr

This has reduced the number of published events quite a bit (it’s now showing as 298 published). But loading events in the backend is still really slow.

The advice about how many events to display I’ve already applied (no more than 3 events showing per day etc), but this is really about speeding up the front end isn’t it? What we’re really struggling with is how long it’s taking to load in the back end.

Can you suggest anything else I can look at?

Thanks for your help with this, I really appreciate it!
Best wishes, Emily

[Cliff]

Glad to hear that setting helped. Yes, the “events per day” is for the front-end only.

I see you’re on PHP 7 so that’s better than older versions, but 7.2 is recommended by WordPress.

Because PHP 7 is probably sufficient to not be considered “slow”, you might check into other settings, such as memory, caching, PHP ini, cleaning up your database, and possibly asking your web host for ideas.

How many Posts or Pages do you have? If you have 200+ Posts and that admin page isn’t slow, maybe we can look a bit further into this.

[Emily Tarrant]

Thanks Cliff

Yes, we’re on PHP 7 at the moment – this is the highest that our web hosts (Heart Internet) are currently offering.

Do you have a recommendation as to what the best memory setting is? And any tips on cleaning up the database? I’m not expecting you to do the work for me (I’m not that cheeky!), but if you’re able to point me in the direction of some info I can work through that would be brilliant.

The site has currently got:
Posts: 110
Pages: 36
Collections (custom post type): 24
Articles (custom post type): 50

These all load without a problem, it’s the events that are particularly slow loading.

Cheers, Emily

[Cliff]

In that case, you might try Query Monitor (https://wordpress.org/plugins/query-monitor/) and then load the wp-admin Events page again and see if there are any slow queries or other things highlighted in the Admin Bar.

I’d also recommend making sure all your Modern Tribe plugins are at their latest versions:

• Downloads / Version Numbers
• License Keys
• TEC Automatic Updates
• or TEC Manual Updates

And here’s information about increasing the memory limit: https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/increasing-the-wordpress-memory-limit/

Please let me know what you find out.

[Emily Tarrant]

Thanks Cliff, I’ll have a go with the query monitor and review the memory settings.

Can I leave this ticket open for the moment and come back to you when I’ve done some testing?

Cheers, Emily

[Cliff]

Sure thing.

Please note that threads get Closed automatically after a couple weeks of inactivity. If it does get Closed, please open a new thread, adding your current problem description and also linking back to this thread.

Thank you!

[Emily Tarrant]

Hi Cliff

I’ve checked the memory settings on the site and have already got it set to 512 – that sounds like it should be plenty doesn’t it?

I’ve installed Query Monitor on a dev copy of the site and if I go to the wp-admin Events page I just get a blank page. That doesn’t seem good does it? Do you know why that might happen?

Cheers, Emily

[Cliff]

A blank page (i.e. white screen of death) should be generating one or more WP_DEBUG errors.

Whenever troubleshooting, it’s best to enable WP_DEBUG and WP_DEBUG_LOG (which will create a file on your server at /wp-content/debug.log if there are any WP_DEBUG messages) and share any debug messages you see while trying to replicate this issue and doing other things on your site relevant to this ticket (such as visiting your site’s home page, events page, single-event pages, and anything else you can think to do).

Please let me know how this goes for you.

[Emily Tarrant]

Hi Chris

Thanks for your continued help with this. I’m having a go with the debug options.

With the query monitor plugin disabled I get just one error:
[10-Jul-2018 07:35:07 UTC] PHP Notice: automatic_feed_links is deprecated since version 3.0.0! Use add_theme_support( ‘automatic-feed-links’ ) instead. in /home/sites/lrmdev.co.uk/public_html/lrm1806/lrm/wp-includes/functions.php on line 3840

I’m due to do a round of updating (including to WP 4.9.7) so I’ll do that and see if that solves that particular error.

But when I turn on query monitor and go to the events admin page I start getting a bunch of memory errors. Here are the last few lines:
[10-Jul-2018 07:36:22 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 163577856) (tried to allocate 2097152 bytes) in /home/sites/lrmdev.co.uk/public_html/lrm1806/lrm/wp-content/plugins/query-monitor/output/html/db_queries.php on line 377
[10-Jul-2018 07:36:29 UTC] PHP Notice: automatic_feed_links is deprecated since version 3.0.0! Use add_theme_support( ‘automatic-feed-links’ ) instead. in /home/sites/lrmdev.co.uk/public_html/lrm1806/lrm/wp-includes/functions.php on line 3840
[10-Jul-2018 07:36:40 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 163577856) (tried to allocate 671744 bytes) in /home/sites/lrmdev.co.uk/public_html/lrm1806/lrm/wp-content/plugins/query-monitor/output/html/db_queries.php on line 386
[10-Jul-2018 07:36:40 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 163577856) (tried to allocate 655360 bytes) in Unknown on line 0

I’ve already got the memory limit quite high, should I increase it more or is there something else I should be looking at?

Cheers, Emily

[Cliff]

Thanks for your effort. The “automatic_feed_links” error isn’t related to our plugins — maybe your theme or another plugin needs to be updated.

Your 160 MB should be sufficient, but the recommended amount is normally 256 MB.

[Emily Tarrant]

Thanks Cliff. I’ll do the updating and then see what it tells me. I’ll let you know what I find out!
Cheers, Emily

[Cliff]

Thanks for the update.

Please note that threads get Closed automatically after a couple weeks of inactivity. If it does get Closed, please open a new thread, adding your current problem description and also linking back to this thread.

Thank you!

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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