Large number of tickets time out

[saha]

Hi, My Woocommerce tickets is working fine in every way until I go to “complete” the orders. If a customer has purchased a large number of tickets in one order or I “bulk” complete orders, I will get an internal server error. We thought this was just the server timing out and so increased the time (previously we could only complete 10 tickets at a time, now we can do a maximum of 18). What happens is that the server error message will come up, if you click on the back button, you will find that the orders have “completed” and tickets have been issued but it will only be some tickets e.g. 9 out of 10 tickets will have issued. I then have the problem that the order is completed and it thinks that 10 tickets are done and paid for but there are only 9 ticket numbers issued and emailed out of the events calendar. We have sold over 2000 tickets in the last few months, so you can imagine that completing them in blocks of 10 is very time consuming. Any ideas?

[Barry]

Hi Saha,

There are a couple of things that come to mind – I’m not completely sure which might be the best fit for your scenario – or if possibly both might apply.

The first is simply if you edit an individual order and set it to “complete”. If the order contains a large number of tickets then the process will take longer simply because all those tickets – which are stored as custom posts in the database – need to be generated.

The second is that when an order is completed the ticket email is also dispatched. In the above scenario that shouldn’t add too much time on by itself, because we’re only talking about a single email, but if you bulk complete a lot of different orders then the time it takes to dispatch the email is going to be multiplied by the number of orders and of course the generation of ticket objects in the database still needs to take place.

So, the problem could amount to a timeout triggered by the volume of tickets and/or emails that are being dispatched.

There are a few ways we could help to mitigate this kind of problem – particularly where a number of tickets fail to generate – but it would take some re-engineering to do so. I’ll certainly log this for further consideration, though.

I wonder: might autocompleting orders help to alleviate things (I appreciate that may not be viable, depending on your payment model etc but it could be worth considering)?

That way, the need to do bulk status changes would be removed and it may help with at least a proportion of your sales.

[saha]

Hi Barry, Yes both issues seem to be a problem. In either scenario there is a problem – either a large order (i.e. more than 18 tickets in the order) or if bulk completing more than 18 tickets at a time. We have already increased the timeout, which as I mentioned has allowed me another 8 tickets. I’m not sure that autocompleting would be a good idea – mainly because it doesn’t alleviate the problem of large numbers of tickets being completed at the same time. When we release a new ticket, we usually get a big rush of orders and clearly if the orders had more than 18 tickets in them, we would have the same issue. At the same time, if a customer purchased more than 18 tickets in their one order, the same problem would arise. This leads to another problem of not keeping track of which orders have not generated tickets properly. At the moment I keep track of every single order I complete so that if it crashes I know to check how many tickets have generated, because I will then have to either generate manual tickets myself outside of Woo or set up a new order to generate more tickets. I’ve now taken to generating manual tickets because it’s faster – particularly with large orders. Either way it’s a pain!

[Barry]

I can definitely appreciate that.

Unfortunately our current release cycle means a substantive fix, baked into our plugins, may still be a release or more away – however we definitely want to do what we can to assist in the short term and so while I can’t offer any guarantees we’re going to investigate a few possibilities that might provide you with some temporary relief from this issue.

My colleague Gustavo will spearhead this and so may drop in here to keep you updated 🙂

[saha]

That would be great. Thanks!

[Gustavo Bordoni]

Hi Amanda,

Sorry for the huge delay on the answer, I’m still working on a good solution for this problem. I will do my best to deliver to you something solid very soon.

My Best Regards,

[saha]

Hi, Just wondering (in the meantime until we can get this fixed) could you give me a way of “completing” my ticket orders without issuing any tickets? I am doing manual tickets (from outside of Woo) for all those orders that are more than 18 tickets and once I’ve done that I obviously want to mark them off as being completed – but if I do that, the system will try to issue tickets.

Could you let me know how I can turn off the tickets that would be great.

Thanks,
Amanda.

[Leah]

Hi there,

Thanks again for your post. We wanted to get in touch and let you know that although we weren’t able to address this issue in our upcoming 3.10 release, it is still very much a priority. We have a ticket in our system and will be investigating a solution to be released in a future version. Thank you for your patience and support while we work on this!

Cheers,
The Events Calendar Team

[Support Droid]

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