"Import: Facebook" Load Time

[Adam]

My site is going to require adding as many events to my site as humanly possible and this FB importer has been doing a great job of that!

I have added quite a bit of FB events to the settings area to automatically check for updates, but now when I click on the “Import: Facebook” it takes FOREVER to load up. Additionally, if I click on only one box to import one event it also has a very massive load time just to import one event.

I am assuming this is because of all the other previously imported events that are loaded in there that are checked and faded. This site will hopefully continue to run for years and add endless FB groups. That being said, is there a way to only display/work with new events that have not been imported already?

If this plugin continues to run like this, this list is going to be extraordinary long and will make the feature unusable due to the list being too long to go through past events as well as increasing the load time past the already frustrating 5+ minutes.

I assume there must be away to fix this as the allure of the product is so that you can import a large amount of continuous events without much interaction. If the system does not allow for on-going events uploads due to the problem I discussed – what really is the point of the plugin?

Any advice, help, suggestions on this matter would be very much appreciated!

Thanks,

Adam

[Geoff]

Hey again, Adam. 🙂

Man, this is a good point. I can definitely see how working with a huge number of Facebook groups and events would cause a strain here.

In fact, I see this has come up in conversations on our team and we have a ticket to work on this because there isn’t a good solution for it at the moment. You can see this thread for more context:

https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/facebook-events-times-out/

I’ve gone ahead and added this thread to the ticket so we can follow-up with you when we have more to share on that development. I honestly don’t have a timeframe for when we would hit that development, but it is on our radar.

Sorry I don’t have a solid solution for you here, but let me know if you have any other follow-up questions here and I’d be happy to help. 🙂

Cheers!
Geoff

[Adam]

Hey Geoff,

First off you have been awesome with all of the help, so thank you for that! 🙂

That is a bummer to hear that there isn’t a solution for it yet. If you think of even some type of random work around where I can adjust some of the coding or create separate entry logs in phpMyAdmin I can always make adjustments that way.

If I imported the pages without having them reoccurring in the settings but just by using their Facebook slug or ID every-time and copy and pasting it in the “Import: Facebook” area would that help to solve the issue that they remain in their faded and checked?

Also I saw on the other ticket he mentioned “you may find 1,300 FB pages is simply too high” — I am not even close to that. I am running 121 currently. I was hoping to do some more too.

With this in mind do you think that upgrading my server would help to solve some of the issues – or do you feel that I am probably going to end up throwing money at something that will continue to cause issues and continue to get worse?

I was ecstatic about this plugin, but am a little disheartened that it seems like it won’t be a working solution in a week or so… Anything we can do to fix this would be amazing! I am even willing to pay for some custom development work if that is an option.

Again… Thanks for all your help with everything! Once I get everything setup it should be pretty smooth sailing! 🙂

[Geoff]

Hey there, Adam!

Thanks for the nice words, man. It’s my pleasure to help out and I’m glad our team has been able to be of service for you. 🙂

I’ve racked my brain against this for a bit and even checked in with some other team members to see if there was a possible workaround here, but I keep coming short. The truth is that we have to do some exploration ourselves to see what we could possibly do on our end to improve the process of importing Facebook events before we even know how to develop a solution for it. As you can imagine, there are a number of ways we could probably approach it, so we would need to spend some time considering those options.

I do think hosting could play a role in this–especially since 120 pages is not especially high and we haven’t seen many reports of a slowdown with that number. However, I would hate to suggest putting money on something that would eventually slowdown regardless of what hosting package is used. At the same time, it could be worth at least talking with your hosting provider to see if there is some low-hanging  fruit to improve the performance of your server as a whole in preparation for housing so many pages and events.

I can totally see why you would be disheartened here. I want to offer you a full refund for the plugin if you feel we’ve fallen short on expectations. Let me know if that’s something you’d be interested in–I want to make sure we do right by you.

Thanks again for following up. Is there anything else I can help you with here?

Cheers!
Geoff

[Geoff]

Hello Adam! Just checking in to see if there’s anything else I can do to help here or if you have any follow-up questions–please let me know. 🙂

Cheers!
Geoff

[Adam]

Hey Geoff,

While it doesn’t fit my needs quite as much as I hoped I still will be using the plugin for what I can until it no longer works at all.

I hope that your team finds a solution for this issue for the future soon so I can continue to use it for the life of the site! If the solution is an additional add on that works I will for sure buy it!

Thanks for all your help on this. Please let me know if there is ever an update to resolve this mentioned load problem.

thanks,

Adam

[Geoff]

You bet, Adam! Thanks again for following up here–please feel free to get back in touch if any other questions pop up and we’d be happy to help. 🙂

Cheers!
Geoff

[Geoff]

Hey Adam,

Great news! After a lot of work and effort, we were able to make release what we believe is a great solution for the issue of events not importing from Facebook due to timeout limitations.

Since this thread was opened, not only has Facebook updated it API, but we have developed a new product called Event Aggregator that is fully compatible with it and overcomes the importing issues that Facebook Events encountered. In particular, Event Aggregator is not a plugin, but a service that is already available in The Events Calendar 4.3 and, when purchasing a license to activate it, it uses the power of our servers here at Modern Tribe to handle much larger imports than Facebook Events ever could running on a typical shared server.

Event Aggregator is now available and you should even have a complimentary license for it if you already have an active Facebook Events license to help you make the switch.

In addition, we’ve put together a handy guide that outlines best practices for importing events using Event Aggregator to help get the most out of your imports:

https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/plugin/event-aggregator/

Thanks so much for your patience while we worked on this. We know it has been a long-running item everyone’s wishlist and we couldn’t be more excited to finally get it into your hands.

Cheers,
Geoff

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