Slow Event Edit Page with Large Number of Organizers and Venues

[hikeitbaby]

Our website has large amounts of data, 12k+ events, 5k+ organizers and 14k+ venues. We believe that because of the amount of data and the way you have programmed certain aspects of your plugin we are experiencing extremely long load times, specifically on the edit event page. On that page, one of your methods in your plugin is loading all 5k+ organizers and 14k+ venues into two dropdowns on the page.

Through various methods of testing, including looking at NewRelic data for specific functions that are taking a long time to process and by incrementally eliminating data from our database and running performance tests in the browser, we have narrowed down this issue to one feature / function in your plugin: Linked_Posts::saved_linked_post_dropdown(). This method echos two <select> lists with <options> for all the 19k+ organizers and venues in our database. Because of the large amount of data, this seems to take 40-50s in our current case (just for this task). You can see in the attached image that by incrementally deleting data from our database that load times improve. I even tried directly modifying the plugin to just echo an empty <select> list at the very top of the function (and return immediately after) to bypass the rest of the processing (which resulted in the fastest load times).

As a potential fix to this problem, I think that moving the loading of this data to AJAX and only loading it in chucks or based on the query being typed in (similar to what we are doing on our front end: http://g.recordit.co/Z61RjaDK4u.gif which can be tested here: https://hikeitbaby.com/find-a-hike/submit-a-hike/add) would greatly improve the performance of this page. You would then only want to echo a single item or two into the select lists from the method mentioned previously, just the one that is currently selected…

I see that other customers have encountered this and similar issues: https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/query-is-too-long-for-organizers-info-and-venue-info-methods/
but your suggestions to turn off the WPE_GOVERNOR only help with the actual execution of long queries and do not address the actual performance issues of loading tens of thousands of entries onto a page… Do you have any plans to address these types of concerns so that your plugin is more scalable and won’t impact the performance of the rest of the site?

We sometimes have multiple volunteers working on reviewing and approving our publicly submitted event data and when they are all online trying to edit and publish events (“hikes” in our case) and the edit page they are trying to use takes 50-60+s for every load, it not only takes them a lot of time and is frustrating, but also causes our site to slow down, the result of which is 502 errors caused by WP Engine killing off various processes (on the front and back end). 90% of the time, the location and/or organizer doesn’t even change, so the fact that data is being loaded every time is completely unnecessary and only needs to be available when someone clicks on that dropdown. And even then, they will be searching for a specific venue which could be queried for over AJAX.

[Hunter]

Hello and welcome back,

Thank you for the in-depth post and sorry to hear you’re experiencing slow load times. That is quite the number of events, venues, and organizers! I spent a few minutes reviewing our reports to see if I can find anything related to your issue and actually found a report including your specific issues with load times, including data provided by you.

It’s still marked as ‘Open’ – which means it’s making its way through the necessary channels and will be reviewed in a timely manner. I wish I had a better answer for you at this time and I’ve linked this thread to the logged report for the developers to reference while reviewing said report. I’ve linked some helpful articles that you’re most likely aware of below, but you never know. Thanks for understanding and have a great afternoon. Cheers!

• https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/caching-basics/
• https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/caching-month-view-transients/
• https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/caching-basics/
• https://theeventscalendar.com/the-events-calendar-performance-considerations/
• https://theeventscalendar.com/favorite-developer-plugins/

[hikeitbaby]

Hi Hunter,

Unfortunately, your links there don’t help because the problem we are specifically encountering is on THE BACKEND, not the front-end of the site, which is where caching solutions and limiting the data displayed comes into play.

So the question then becomes, what are the data limitations of The Events Calendar Pro? Is it recommended only for uses up to XXXX events, XXXX locations, XXXX organizers? I understand that we are in the minority of your customers who use the tool for such a large calendar, but it’s your responsibility to be upfront about AT WHAT POINT SHOULD POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS OF TEC LOOK FOR ANOTHER TOOL, something more enterprise? Having this stated somewhere explicitly would improve your brand’s reputation. I’ve reached out personally to other members of the forum who were having these type of issues, and they’ve sadly said that they’ve all had to move on to other software. We would like to know whether this is the route we need to do rather than spending any additional thousands of dollars and weeks of development getting TEC to work for us.

I’m not trying to complain, we’re just at a cross roads and need some solid answers.

Thank you.

[Hunter]

Hello,

I understand the links I referred to apply mainly to the front end, I simply like to share them in any conversation regarding performance. With that said, I truly do apologize I don’t have a better answer for you at this time other than pointing out I’ve included this forum thread in the logged report regarding your issues. Additionally, we are always working towards improving how our plugin handles large amounts of data, so please don’t think we are “writing off” the feedback users who have a lot of events, venues, and organizers give us.

I brought this thread up in our team conversation and a support member recommended you check out Pantheon web hosting as it might be beneficial in this instance. Again, my apologies I don’t have a solid answer as to what our approach is from here on our in regards to your specific issue, but it’s been noted and will be reviewed and acted upon as the developers see fit.

Thank you for the constructive criticism and detailed explanations and please let me know if you have any more questions or comments. Have a great weekend.

[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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