Site at a Snail's Pace

[boyd]

We recently had to disable The Events Calendar and The Events Calendar Pro on our website. The website had slowed to a snail’s pace and when we checked the server the CPU was constantly maxed out at 100%. After disabling all of the plugins we determined The Events Calendar was the plugin eating up all of the resources. We would like to continue using the plugin, but we cannot sacrifice the speed of the website. Will upgrading help resolve this issue? Something in that plugin kills the server. Thanks.

[Barry]

Hi Boyd!

I believe been a number of improvements relating to query performance – more so in 3.0 which will be released shortly.

That said, there are a large number of variables that have to be considered including the number and type of event posts, whether customizations are in place, the level of resources available to the web and database servers, the amount of visitor traffic, levels and types of caching in use and so on – so it’s not possible for me to say that 3.0 will be a silver bullet but it may at least mitigate some of the issues.

You could potentially measure the difference between your current version and 2.0.11 (and, shortly, you can do the same with 3.0) by installing them in a replica of your production site – that will give you some decent data to help shape your decisions going forward.

[boyd]

Then you should be a disclaimer that says before you drop any coin make sure your site has no real traffic and / or need to post any substantial number of events.

[Barry]

Though I can appreciate your frustration I don’t really think that’s a fair comment.

It simply isn’t the case that websites will suddenly become unable to handle real traffic once our plugins are installed, far from it: what is true is that the resources available on the server need to be sufficient to handle the demand created by the stream of visitors and the needs of the application … that is of course true even if you didn’t use our plugin.

Perhaps the overhead of implementing the extra features and functionality offered by The Events Calendar is passing a certain ‘tipping point’ in the case of your hosting environment … are you able to give any details about your traffic volume and type of web hosting? What sort of caching is in use?

We do of course want to deliver code that is as efficient as possible – and we have been making strides in that direction with our 3.0 code which should be released shortly. In the meantime though I’m not sure there is much we can offer here.

[George]

Hi, we’ve been seeing some memory spikes recently and after running tests it seems to point to the Event Cal plugin. Currently running v2.11 – when does 3.0 come out? Do you have any tips on how to optimise the plugin.

[Barry]

Caching (including query caching at the database level) can make a huge difference when set up correctly.

Regarding 3.0 all I can say is … we’re very close!

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