Slow Loading Speed on all Pages Using Event Calendar Pro

[jessebrede]

Hey Team,

I’m seeing some very slow load times for the main page.
http://austinaa.wpengine.com/meetings/

We have caching turned on:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/d58hpkxybt4hfhs/Screenshot%202015-08-10%2016.27.28.png?dl=0

We are using WP Engine for hosting with object caching turned on.

Even loading a single event is taking some serious time:
http://austinaa.wpengine.com/meeting/northland-group-small-room-4/2015-08-10/

We have a lot of recurring events. I trimmed them down from 65k to 9k.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/fyygbpcz66hmy2g/Screenshot%202015-08-10%2016.29.23.png?dl=0

That’s most certainly a contributing factor but I would think that with caching this should be doable.

Is there a number of events that you’ve found works well?

Please advise.

[George]

Hi Jesse,

Having 65,000 events is more than just a contributing factor, and even with some caching in place that’s still an enormous load – both in perspective of our plugin(s) and of WP Engine hosting itself.

So, the fact that you cut this down to 9,000 events is a huge help.

If you have a single event that is part of a very, very long event series, then that might take a bit of time to load, but I’m curious about your comment about the performance of this page:

http://austinaa.wpengine.com/meeting/northland-group-small-room-4/2015-08-10/

That event actually loaded very quickly for me, and it did even when I went to the “View All” page for that recurring event series.

Even the main events page loaded really quickly for me!

I even made a screencast video of what I found on your site, just so you don’t think I’m being dishonest about how fast your site performs for me. Check out the video → https://cloudup.com/c9dzEpuD_fu

In that video I first check out the main page, then check out http://austinaa.wpengine.com/meeting/northland-group-small-room-4/2015-08-10/.

Let me know what your thoughts are on this, thanks Jesse!

[jessebrede]

Okay, I’m having a few other people test it.

For me, the pages are still taking anywhere from 10-30 seconds to load. I’ve tested my network and have plenty of bandwidth and other pages on the site load just fine.

On the main event page, the basic page loads very quickly, but the ajax loading icon shows for at least 10-20 seconds.
See the screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ed1k92ughvo6yx2/Screenshot%202015-08-11%2011.04.44.png?dl=0 – 16 seconds for admin-ajax.php to load.

It looks like its the tribe_geosearch that is really slowing things down:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7rqz1xw5r52j21y/Screenshot%202015-08-11%2011.07.25.png?dl=0
WP Engine said they saw this taking a long time to complete as well. Is there something I should try to cut down load time on this?

http://austinaa.wpengine.com/meeting/northland-group-small-room-4/2015-08-10/ took 17 seconds to load:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/p9c4sr5eqzzs69x/Screenshot%202015-08-11%2011.05.52.png?dl=0

So yes, I see your pages loading fast but mine are still very slow. I can try cutting down the events to 2 or even 1 month recurring if need be.

Thanks,
Jesse

[George]

Hey Jesse,

Thanks for the feedback, detail, and screenshots there. In trying to think about this I unfortunately can’t think of anything that would help as much as doing exactly what you described in your post above, at least until we get better performance improvements into the plugin over the next several releases:

I can try cutting down the events to 2 or even 1 month recurring if need be.

Let me know if you’re able to do this successfully and if it does, indeed, make as much of a helpful impact as we hope it will!

Thank you,
George

[jessebrede]

Okay, thanks for your help. Again, is there no way to limit the number of Geo lookups? Can you give me some insight into what is happening in that admin-ajax.php script? Seems like there should be some type of limit imposed that would make this an easy fix, right?

Seems like we may need to move to Time.ly or something more robust.

[Paul Gilliot]

Hi Jesse, George

Like many others we are having the same issues with resource usage on the main calendar.
As soon as you hit that page, the resources got 100% and it takes out the site.

We only have 64 events in the calendar.
Non are recurring.

There’s something seriously wrong with the calendar – and we’re seeing lots of people with the same issue.
Jesse, we just tested your calendar page and it hung too.
So I think its tiem you guys got your head out of the sand.

By simply clicking /events-calendar/
you see these results…

CPU Usage 92 / 100 %
Virtual Memory Usage 822.6 / 1024 MB
Physical Memory Usage 771.2 / 1024 MB

Paul

[jessebrede]

I have to agree with Paul. The events calendar doesn’t seem to be optimized for performance at all. Given the price point, I think it should at least handle several thousand events. Since it uses the wp_posts and wp_postmeta there should be indexes on this.

My guess is that function to look up map points is slow and limited by Google. It’s really not made to look up that many points. The Events Calendar team should put in a cap on that call or just look up the first event in each recurring series.

I’ll probably be moving away from this and using a system like Time.ly to do what I need.

[George]

Hey Jesse and Paul,

Before a question I have, I just wanted to note that we are indeed working hard on performance improvements for The Events Calendar and the premium Add-ons. There are some new things we can take advantage of both within WordPress and within our codebase itself – our updates from 3.9.x up to the big planned 4.0 release are laying lots of groundwork for some serious improvements, and hopefully we can stay on schedule and get these improvements published soon in the coming weeks and months.

Now, onto the questions:

Paul, who is your web host? And what other plugins are on your site?

I ask because having these performance problems with only 64 events is unheard of – I cannot recreate these problems at all.

Jesse’s problems are quite different than this – I admit to and can recreate performance problems with the number of events he has, and with lots of recurrence data and such. These sorts of things are what we’re working hard to improve.

But if I have 64, 100, 200, 300, 500 events, my performance is fine and actually quite fast, faster than our plugin code at version 3.9.x. So there seems to be more to the story with your issues, Paul. Let us know information about your server/hosting setup, and what other plugins are active and such, and we can hopefully go from there.

Thank you both for your patience, especially this week as I was out of town on the 12th and 13th for a semi-urgent family matter that was originally planned for this weekend, the 15th and 16th. Very sorry about the delayed response from that!

Sincerely,
George

[Paul Gilliot]

Hi George

Thanks for getting back to me.
Ive sent the login details to Geoff on this post.

Excessive resources? It's Pro and Not Free Version

One point, this only occurs when we hit the main calendar.
On mini calendars, they load fine.

Plus, if we deactivate Pro – the free version displays the entire calendar quickly and without issue.

Which suggests that its not the server?
We trying a mamp install of the entire site to eliminate that option.

Paul

[Paul Gilliot]

Update : The Mamp version also has trouble loading the main calendar.
So we’re still none the wiser.

[Paul Gilliot]

Hi Guys,

Just a quick update – we found the cause of the error – which might pertain to yours too Jesse.
Our chosen theme uses shortcodes – as do most, these days.

If your ‘description’ has shortcodes in it – these shortcodes will try to be rendered in the Tooltip of the Main calendar.

This caused the calendar to fail in our scenario.
By adding a manual ‘Excerpt’ to each of the Events, we found that there was no issues at all with page loads and the event calendar functions.

Boom!

[George]

Thank you for sharing what you found to be the problem, Paul – shortcodes in general should not cause problems but if they happen to be added incorrectly to the theme or have conflicting code within them then odd issues can certainly arise.

Thanks!
George

[jessebrede]

We’re bailing out guys. We found a plugin that is made for 12 step meetings and should work like we need. It has the map functionality and works just fine. Also, it’s free.

Can’t say this experience has made me a fan. This is my second time purchasing Events Calendar Pro with disappointing results. I know you guys try really hard but I always seem to have a use case that breaks your plugin.

[George]

I’m sorry that things didn’t work out, but am glad you found a better alternative. If your purchase here on http://theeventscalendar.com was within the last 30 days, email us at [email protected] and we’ll happily issue a refund.

We do indeed try hard, but there are countless things that can cause performance issues like the ones you found impossible to work around. I fully admit that our code is part of that, and we’ve got some big performance improvements coming over the next few releases 🙂

Best of luck with your site!

[Author]

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