Recurring Events Not Being Created

[Troy]

Please refer to this previous issue:

Recurring Events Not Being Created

This issue seems to be happening again. Per your instruction we manually edited about 1500 recurring events to get them to autopopulate out into the future. That was a few months ago and now we are up against the same problem. Most of these events are now set to expire on Dec 21st so it is looking like we will have to do the exact same task of editing events. I won’t go into how long it took to edit all of these events the first time around since it obviously took quite some time.

In the previous thread this was acknowledged as a bug in the previous version of the software that has now been addressed. It seems that the bug has not been addressed and is continuing. What is the next step to resolve this issue so we can continue to utilize recurring events?

Could it be that the chron job that is supposed to create the recurrance is running out of resources or not completing? How can we check to ensure that this task is executing and running to completion without errors?

[Nico]

Hi Troy,

Thanks for reaching out and sorry to hear this is still an issue 🙁 I’ve gone over your previous thread with George, and as you state maybe the cron to ‘update’ the recurrence instances is not working as expected. But I’m not sure that’s the case.

You can install the WP-Crontrol plugin to inspect and run scheduled crons. With the plugin installed you can check if you see tribe_events_pro_process_recurring_events and tribe-recurrence-cron tasks in there (WP-Admin > Tools > Cron Events), and if you are in the staging site, please try to run them using the Run Now option.

I would also like to now if you updated the plugins to the 4.0 version just released yesterday. In the case you didn’t, Can you do it before testing the Crons?

Please let me know about your findings,
Best,
Nico

[Troy]

Niko,

We did some testing on 4.0 and updated in both our dev and prod environments.

Some notes from my web developer:

I installed the WP Crontrol plugin on Dev and Prod and reviewed the scheduled cron events. It was hard at first to tell if hitting “Run” on either the “tribe_events_pro_process_recurring_events” or “tribe-recurrence-cron” actually did anything.

One difference between Dev and Prod is that we have the “Create recurring events in advance for” option set to 3 months on Dev and 6 months on Prod. I started thinking that maybe 6 months is too much for Prod to handle, so I switched it to 2 months.

Then I went back to WP Crontrol and tried running both cron events again. I noticed that running “tribe-recurrence-cron” seemed to trigger changes for about 15 minutes at a time. The total number of events would decrease by about 100 events each time I ran it, then it would stop. I think the decrease in events makes sense since this process should be clearing out old events, while possibly also deleting future events more than 2 months out.
Dev currently has 17,161 total events, while Prod has 23,691. We know that Dev looks better than Prod at this point, so I was hoping that continually running the “tribe-recurrence-cron” would get Prod to look more like Dev. In any case, it seems that something causes it to stop running after about 15 minutes – even though it appears to have a lot more work to do.

Maybe some of that would be good to share with the calendar support. They might know more about the crons and why it would stop running early.

Please let me know if you have any insight on this. As you can imagine, refreshing this many events manually is an extremely daunting task.

[Nico]

Hey Troy,

Thanks for the much-complete follow-up with your dev comments 🙂

Looks like you have lots of events in the site, and what your dev is saying about cutting a bit down the time for events to being created (and clean-up) seems like a good decision to make. The cron job to adjust this should run automatically. I think it’s not failing after 15 minutes (or 100 events), but it working on batches. It should complete the work over time if the cron is running.

Getting back to the original issue can you ask your dev if the crons are working as expected in the server (Are dev and prod in the same environment?). Can you ask him to contact the hosting provider and ask about how Crons work in their server and if they are aware of any incompatibility with WordPress Crons?

Thanks a lot,
Best,
Nico

[Troy]

The batches that you mention never seem to complete and that appears to be the issue that has been going on with our events. As you noted, we do have a very large amount of events and we were told that the pro version would be tolerant of any number of events. These batches should eventually get caught up but we have been experiencing this issue since September and they never seem to add new events unless we manually edit/save a recurrence.

Are there batch processing logs that we can review to find out why this is failing? I will share your questions with our web host and let you know the answers that they provide.

[Troy]

The hosting company (synthesis) shared the following with me:

We use the following cron job form the server side to perform the wp-cron process:
*/5 * * * * www-data wget -O /dev/null -o /dev/null http://domain.com/wp-cron.php
Could you please share these details with the plugin author? We can also implement any custom cron job that you or your site may need for getting everything working as expected.

[Nico]

Hey Troy,

Our plugin should handle big amount of events gracefully, if the set up is prepared for that. Not blaming your server on this, but there are many things that can lead to improving performance. Anyway I’m not sure if this is the case.

I’ll need to review this with a developer to get a more precise strategy on how we can continue debugging/testing the crons, and why they are failing. One last thing, are there any errors in the server error log? If crons are failing there should be some sort of trace in there I guess.

Please let me know about the error log so I can review this with a developer from the team,
Best,
Nico

[Troy]

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[Nico]

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• This reply was modified 10 years, 4 months ago by Troy. Reason: Set Private

[Troy]

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[Nico]

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[Troy]

I installed the WP Crontrol plugin on Dev and Prod and reviewed the scheduled cron events. It was hard at first to tell if hitting “Run” on either the “tribe_events_pro_process_recurring_events” or “tribe-recurrence-cron” actually did anything.

One difference between Dev and Prod is that we have the “Create recurring events in advance for” option set to 3 months on Dev and 6 months on Prod. I started thinking that maybe 6 months is too much for Prod to handle, so I switched it to 2 months. Still didn’t seem to finish so I dropped it to 1 month with no success.

Then I went back to WP Crontrol and tried running both cron events again. I noticed that running “tribe-recurrence-cron” seemed to trigger changes for about 15 minutes at a time. The total number of events would decrease by about 100 events each time I ran it, then it would stop. I think the decrease in events makes sense since this process should be clearing out old events, while possibly also deleting future events more than 2 months out.
Dev currently has 17,161 total events, while Prod has 23,691. We know that Dev looks better than Prod at this point, so I was hoping that continually running the “tribe-recurrence-cron” would get Prod to look more like Dev. In any case, it seems that something causes it to stop running after about 15 minutes – even though it appears to have a lot more work to do.

After the cron jobs complete, I do not see additional errors in the error log that would indicate what might be going on. Memory errors, database errors, nothing like that.

[George]

Hi @Troy,

Apologies for the delayed reply – Nico’s been out-of-office for a while so I wanted to jump in here and try to keep things moving.

From your last reply, it’s not quite clear to me what issues persist on your site. I’m sorry about this!

Can you do the following things?

1. Clarify what specific issues remain.

2. Share your system information now, since a meaningful amount of time has passed since you last posted it. Here’s how to post your system information → https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/sharing-sys-info/

3. Can you clarify how you are hosting your website? Are you hosting it with a company you pay monthly for, for example? If so: who? And what plan of theirs are using? Any detail here is appreciated.

Thank you!
George

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