Multisite WordPress site — regular outages due to calendar db problems

[Mike Kirby]

I had opened a ticket last year on this issue in an effort to learn what we could do to optimize our use of The Events Calendar PRO on our multisite network. The multiple left joins were causing overall system slowness:

https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/improving-performance-on-multisite-environment-options/

In recent weeks we have found our site has been routinely going offline, and the culprit appears to be the events calendar plugin. I will follow this up with log entries from the 6pm outage last night.

Is there any movement toward improving the optimization of The Events Calendar in this regard? I am concerned that this problem has gotten worse as we stand up more sites on our multisite network, and we are painting ourselves into a corner performance-wise by having The Events Calendar Pro network-activated.

[Mike Kirby]

This reply is private.

[Andras]

Hello Mike,

Thanks for reaching out again! I’m sorry about the performance and outage issue you are experiencing.

Thanks for submitting the log details. This issue is a bit beyond me, so I will try to get someone from the team to look at this.

Meanwhile I saw that you are using older versions of our plugins. It is recommended that you update them to the latest versions. Best is to do it on a test / staging site to test if all is working fine, or at least after a full site backup, so you can restore if something doesn’t go as planned.

Please hang in there, someone will be in touch soon. Thanks for your patience!

Cheers,
Andras

[Brook]

Howdy Mike,

Thank you for taking the time to reach out, and especially share your logs. Performance is incredibly important to us, and more than once log sharing has helped us to isolate issues on certain server types or configurations.

The reason performance is so important to us is because WordPress’ flexibility in some situations imposes astounding overhead. With meta date queries, like you shared last year, it is hundreds of times slower than it could be. As you can imagine a calendar has to do a lot of date queries. Thus any calendar built according to the WordPress best practice has a severe performance handicap, and we have to continually work very hard to make it fast.

JOINs in particular are painfully slow, and we investigate them all to see which we can remove. At times our programmers have been very inventive with finding ways to remove these.

That said, it’s not like our software is perfect. No large piece of software can claim it’s performing the best it can, this is always an ongoing battle. Right now we have a few performance issues with The Events Calendar we’re working to address. But the notable ones are all limited in scope, and do not affect every page. Do any of these sound like they might be affecting you?

• Admin page has an unnecessary JOIN when you have hidden the date columns. Your log did not indicate what page was being viewed, tho other logs might. Was the page that was being loaded when the server crash an admin one?
• Month view with caching enabled is not caching JSON+LD. A workaround is available for disabling JSON+LD. Was the page Month view?
• Minicalendar widget does some unnecessary queries. Do you have the Minical enabled?
• There are some other miscellaneous issues, all causing a very small performance impact. Some fixes for these are being worked on, and might result in page load speeds that are ~2% faster.

Please let me know if you have any question. Performance is a big passion of mine and I’d love to dive in as deep as you want.

Cheers!

– Brook

[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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