Sluggish performance. 3,500 events – 3,000 of them in the past.

[Glenn]

Hi,

Getting back into the summer months and events start to happen again. I’ve noticed over time that the site runs really slow. I have previously tried a cache plugin and it was a nightmare. (Even to remove).

How does the board clean up after itself? (if it does at all)

Is it something to do with the recurring event cleanup setting? What about events that don’t repeat?

I’ve manually gone through and removed about 2,500 of them but I feel there should be an automated process doing it for me.

Glenn.

[Josh]

Hey Glenn,

Thanks for reaching out to us!

The option that you’re referring to with the recurring events can be modified to keep fewer, past recurring events and this will definitely help. If you change it to keep 3 or 6 months worth of past events it will automatically delete any older recurring events the next time that cleanup is scheduled to occur.

For other events, you could try a plugin such as https://wordpress.org/plugins/auto-prune-posts/ to have older events automatically deleted from the database.

Let me know if this helps.

Thanks!

[Glenn]

Thanks Josh,

So I assume the auto-delete plugin plays well with your plugin??? There is no danger of messing up repeating events if it starts to delete entries?

What happens if I edit the series after some have been deleted? Will it recreate the deleted ones in the past? (Which will probably then be deleted…)

What post type do I target?

Regards.

Glenn.

[Josh]

Hey Glenn,

One thing before trying that. Would you be willing to revert your plugins back to version 3.11? You can do that by downloading version 3.11 from your account on this site of PRO and version 3.11 of the core plugin from the WordPress.org repository here. Once doing that, do you experience the same sluggish behavior from the site?

Thanks!

[Glenn]

I can try that – there is no incompatibility with the SQL database?

Let’s talk sluggish…

I haven’t been updating the site over my winter and not many people had been visiting it. When I visited it, it would take initially 15+ seconds to load.

I’m not sure what “checks” wordpress triggers when someone visits for the first time after a certain period but I imagine it occasionally checks each of the plugins as well as wordpress to see if there are any updates. As I host on an Australian server as 99% of the traffic should be local I could imagine that this might take a little longer than if it was hosted closer to where the plugins/wordpress lives.

Normally after the 1st page load, things get a little quicker. Maybe 5 seconds to display the main page. I also think that this has reduced since I manually pruned 2,500 old posts.

I just want to make sure that I’m not jumping at ghosts when it is the “normal” operation of wordpress on non-USA hosts.

Glenn.

[Josh]

Hey Glenn,

There could be an initial issue with checks since those events are typically set using WP-Cron. WP-Cron is a bit different than a regular cron since it only gets triggered when there is activity such as a visitor hitting the site. However, the speeding up of the site when you’re on it clicking around may be more due to your browser caching the content rather than anything else.

A couple of questions:

• Do you notice your events pages loading slower than the rest of your site?
• Have you tried activating the new month view cache under the Events > Settings > Display tab? This may help to speed up that page without having to mess with a third party caching plugin.

Thanks!

[Glenn]

Josh, Thanks for the reply.

There isn’t too much more to the site than just the Events Calendar. But other sites on the same server do appear to load quicker.

I don’t use “The Month” view – I mainly use “Photo” as the view. But – I thought I’d try it out. But I am unable to click the checkbox. I did mention a similar issue changing other settings and not being able to in another support request and it was ignored as an issue and closed. (Wasn’t overly happy about it either BTW).

Glenn.

[Josh]

Hey Glenn,

I’m terribly sorry to hear about your previous experience. Would you mind linking to that previous thread? I’ll take a look at the detail there and see how far things got there so we don’t have too much overlap in the diagnostic steps there.

Thanks!

[Support Droid]

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