HTTP 500 Error Listing Attendees

[Robert Harrington]

We have an event with 3800 attendees. When we click on the attendee link to show/check-in the attendees, we get a 500 error or a 502 error.
The site is hosted on WP Engine, on a professional plan, so its not some cheap GoDaddy account.

From the server tech:

“So, Robert, it looks like it’s failing due to allocated memory. You’re set to the server limit of 512MB, and the process itself is trying to allocate more than that.”

They pumped it upto 768, then it shows 502 errors. Then they said this:

“Robert, unfortunately, it is hitting the servers kill script. Processes that take longer than 60 seconds are killed by the server, to ensure server stability.”

At the suggestion of the server tech, we disabled all other plugins and the report did run, but we can’t operate that way.

Question:
1. Is this normal for ~4000 attendees?
2. Can your plugin handle events that large?
3. Do you recommend a different host?

Thanks

[Victor]

Hi Robert!

Thanks for reaching out to us!

I’m sorry to hear you are having that issue. Let me try to help you with this.

3800 attendees is a pretty big number of attendees to fetch. We’ve already had some reports related to memory limits being reached when fetching the attendees list. This is surely something we could do better, but unfortunately there seems to be no workaround this limitation for the moment.

We have a feature ticket open to add pagination to sales & attendees reports that will surely reduce the database load in this area. Since it currently tries to show every attendee for the event, that can result in a lot of queries when you have 1000 attendees, especially 3800 or more.

We don’t have a date yet for when the pagination will be available. Still, I will link this thread to the report so we’ll let you know when the feature is available in a future release of our plugins.

We can’t really say an exact number of attendees that will result in reaching server resources limits, because it really depends on many variables like amount of custom ticket meta, number of orders, etc. and, of course server resources.

The following is a snippet that could help toward customizing the attendee list for you, at the least to give your developer a head start toward how-to:

https://gist.github.com/cliffordp/d1643e84bb41dda0a5c86100ae52b07f

Another thing you could try is setting your server’s PHP to a higher version like 7.0 or 7.1. We know those versions of PHP are significantly more efficient in terms of performance, so it might be worth trying and see if it alleviates the load.

Our Eventbrite Tickets plugin can also help, because you can use Eventbrite’s app and checkin process. A lot of the heavy lifting is handled by Eventbrite’s servers, and thus they charge you some fees. But their ticketing and checkin process is designed to handle large events, and with that plugin it can tie everything into your current calendar. This isn’t a pure WordPress solution, but it might be worth considering it for large events.

I hope this serves of help.

Let us know if you have any other questions and we’d love to help as much possible.

Best,
Victor

[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

[Victor]

Hi Robert!

Just wanted to share with you that a new release of our plugins is out, including a pagination feature in sales and attendees reports in Event Tickets that should fix the issues you reported here.

Find out more about this release → https://theeventscalendar.com/release-event-tickets-4-7-event-tickets-plus-4-7/

We always recommend using a staging site to test new versions before updating on a live site > https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/creating-using-wordpress-staging-site/

Don’t hesitate to reach out to us if anything comes up.

Best,
Victor

[Author]

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