Scheduled Imports Not Working

[David Bloch]

Hello. I am running The Event Calendar with the Event Aggregator plugin. My site is hosted through DreamPress, running wordpress 4.8.2 and all plugins are up to date. Since installing the plugin last month, the scheduled imports has not been working reliably. I have added 6 Facebook pages to pull from daily, all work successfully when running a manual import. However, none of them were being scheduled daily. To be clear, they were not failing… they just weren’t being scheduled at all. After deleting and re-adding them, two of the six Facebook sources began importing, but even those were unreliably scheduled and being run at random times roughly every two days. I would like all 6 to reliably import daily at around the same time. I tried deleting and re-adding several more times, and trying other times like every 30 minutes, but these are not being scheduled reliably either. Sometimes they run every few hours, most of the time not they are not even scheduled. Occasionally a scheduled one will see an error “Import Failed” and other times ones will get stuck indefinitely on “Import Pending”. Please let me know what I can do to get this plugin working reliably.

[Courtney]

Hi David

Yesterday we shipped The Events Calendar 4.6.1, which included a few bug fixes for Event Aggregator. Can you be sure to update to that and test the imports again?

Also, possibly bump the imports to several hours apart vs. the 30min option. Let me know how that goes.

Thanks
Courtney 🙂

[David Bloch]

The update seemed to improve things a bit, but scheduled imports are still unreliable. They are not running at the same time every day, and still sometimes go days without running at all. Manual imports still work. Sometimes I will still get the occasional stuck ‘Import Pending’ or ‘Import Failed’. All import sources are set to run once a day. Is there something I’m missing?

[Barry]

Hi David,

What you’re describing might be a side effect of the way scheduled events are triggered.

To explain: WordPress supports a concept of scheduled events and they can be seen as a sort of regularly occurring background task (a piece of code that, theoretically, runs every 30 mins or at some other interval).

In relation to Event Aggregator, we make use of scheduled events to process imports — however, in the simplest and default case supported by WordPress, they actually are not guaranteed to run at the designated intervals.

If, for example, visitor traffic isn’t fairly constant then they may fail to run (or won’t be triggered often enough to process all the waiting tasks). There’s a pretty good description of this here:

http://www.lucasrolff.com/wordpress/why-wp-cron-sucks

It’s an external link and we don’t necessarily agree with the title of the post, but it does explain things pretty well besides covering a possible solution. Note that many shared web hosts (if that’s what you are using) provide notes in their respective knowledgebases that describes how to set up a ‘real’ cron job in a way that makes sense for their setup, so it could be worth researching that if you want to change how this operates.

Armed with that knowledge, does this sound like a viable hypothesis to you – or have you already configured things to use ‘real’ cron?

If you haven’t, it may be worth looking into this. If for any reason you can’t set up real cron tasks and need to rely on WordPress’s implementation, that would also be good to know.

Last but not least, if you already have real cron in place then again let me know so we can think through the next steps.

Thanks and please let me know if I can clarify any of the above 🙂

[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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