Unable to View Month View – Causes Non-Responsive Page

[Michael]

The month view for Calendar Pro does not load anymore, page times out and crashes on both safari and chrome while in firefox shows a nearly 2 min load time for the calendar view alone… Everything is up to date and we don’t have any recurring events.

Is there something I can do to fix this or is this a bug?

Thank you

[Michael]

This reply is private.

[Cliff]

Hi, Michael. Sorry you’re experiencing this.

Each performance-related issue can be a unique mix of theme, plugins, settings, hosting, etc. but we do have these resources available that might help:

• Caching Basics
• Caching Month View Transients
• The Events Calendar Performance Considerations
• Some of our favorite plugins for developers

I’d strongly suggest starting by enabling WP_DEBUG and WP_DEBUG_LOG and resolving any debug messages you see while changing tickets quantity, navigating your site’s home page, events page, single-event pages, and any other of your site’s pages relevant to this ticket.

Please let me know what you find out and how things go for you.

[Michael]

Hey Cliff,
I enabled debugging and after about half an hour of clicking around the only issue i received was “[20-Jan-2017 02:26:31 UTC] PHP Notice: Constant FORCE_SSL_ADMIN already defined in /home2/creatjb7/public_html/test/wp-config.php on line 101″ which was on every page and has no affect on loading. I checked out the transients and cleared those out – made no improvement. The query monitor plugin shows some interesting info but nothing unusual.

The point remains that month view for events is at a standstill and this is a new issue. I can view list, week, day perfectly but if I try a month view everything freezes up. I did notice that viewing month view using the shortcode ([tribe_events view=”month”]) is extremely quick (same speed as viewing month view used to be) there’s just something off with month view on the main calendar page. This worked perfect prior to the update. I’ve noticed several others are having similar issues, could you please prioritize this as an issue as this issue makes the events calendar unusable in month view… Should I revert to prior version until this is sorted? How do I go about doing that?

[Michael]

I’ve also noticed this issue on main calendar page:

[20-Jan-2017 15:18:42 UTC] PHP Notice: Undefined offset: 0 in /wp-content/plugins/the-events-calendar/src/Tribe/Asset/Bootstrap_Datepicker.php on line 15

[Brook]

Howdy Michael!

Because Cliff knows I love performance topics he reached out and asked me if I had any ideas on what might be going on here.

First of all, thank you very much for enabling logging and taking the time to click around. That is very helpful.

Your server is generating a 500 error when a month is viewed. Usually the server has a separate set of logs for 500 errors. Do you know where the “server error logs” are located on you server? Do they indicate an error message, such as “memory exhaustion” that coincides with the time/date that you attempted to view a Month?

Based on how many events are showing up in Week view, it would seem Month is probably try to show about 150 events. Put simply, that’s a lot! While you shared a link to a single category, Month view still has to sort through ~150 events total before deciding which ones to display.

Due to the nature of Month View, which can show up 126 event titles and descriptions on one page, it is the slowest calendar view. This is why the view has built-in caching. Have you enabled Month View cache in WP Admin > Events > Display? If not, would you mind trying to enable this? Further, would you mind adding this snippet to your theme’s functions.php file? That snippet disables JSON+LD in month view, which due to a current bug can further speed up month view. With this in place, does Month View load?

If not, could you try temporarily deactivating the Filter Bar plugin, then seeing if you can load Month View? You can reenable it as soon as your done and not lose any data or anything. Filter Bar is a very powerful plugin, and a side effect of some of its capabilities is that it can slow things down a bit. Thus, disabling it might help speed things up just enough to bypass the memory exhaustion or timeout that is apparently happening. Knowing if it does will give us a little bit more info to diagnose with.

Does that all make sense? Do you mind trying those things?

Cheers!

– Brook

[Michael]

Hi Brook,
I’m happy to hear you like performance topics, I could use some help!

I went through the server logs and did not see any (unexpected) memory issues/time out/limit. I’ve seen them before when working with events calendar views but they’ve cleared up within past month or so which is great.

I did notice another error showing up (PHP Deprecated: Automatically populating $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA is deprecated and will be removed in a future version. To avoid this warning set ‘always_populate_raw_post_data’ to ‘-1’ in php.ini) which I’ve since fixed. I also cleared out old revisions/trash in the database and now the month view will load but it takes about 30 seconds.

We have the built in caching enabled as well WP Rocket (which I’ve toggled on/off to check for compatibility issues) – switching those on/off didn’t seem to make much of a difference with calendar view load times. The month view varies from 28 – 32 seconds now where as before it would load in just a few seconds.

I added the JSON+LD code to functions.php, toggled the filter bar, and category colors plugin and didn’t notice much of a difference between any of them. :-/

We have a lot of events which are not really events but merely time slots for people to sign up for (like you would book an appointment at gym or in this case an art studio). Those are not important to show on a month view ever, would it help if I set all of those with the “Hide From Event Listings” flag = Yes? Would the month view then skip over them? I’m not sure how that view is built.

Currently I’m seeing this error show up in the logs:
“PHP: syntax error, unexpected ‘{‘ in /home2/creatjb7/php.ini on line 889, referer:https://www…”

And line 889 in the php.ini file is:
url_rewriter.tags = “a=href,area=href,frame=src,input=src,form=,fieldset=”

I’m going to email our web host and find out if they can make sense of that but its shows up for nearly every page served. The site is undergoing lots of development so very well could get fixed but in the meantime doesn’t seem to affect performance…

Let me know your thoughts on setting the flag and anything else you might be able to see now that the view loads! Thanks!

-Michael

[Brook]

Excellent! I am happy you got the page to load. That does help shed more light on the issue.

I noticed that when you click the next/prev buttons while in Month view, they load decently quick. These buttons reload the content area of the page with the new month. This led me to conclude that the primary thing slowing down your site is JSON+LD, because that will not be reloaded when you click next/prev month.

I further realized that the snippet I shared to disabled JSON+LD has stopped working in recent versions of WordPress. I just updated it. Would you mind removing the code from your functions.php that I had you add before, and replacing it with the updated version?

I’m going to email our web host and find out if they can make sense of that but its shows up for nearly every page served. The site is undergoing lots of development so very well could get fixed but in the meantime doesn’t seem to affect performance…

Good call on contacting the host. I’d agree, this is unlikely to be related to your performance issue.

We have a lot of events which are not really events but merely time slots for people to sign up for (like you would book an appointment at gym or in this case an art studio). Those are not important to show on a month view ever, would it help if I set all of those with the “Hide From Event Listings” flag = Yes? Would the month view then skip over them? I’m not sure how that view is built.

Setting the flag should speed things up a bit. But, if you don’t necessarily want to hide those listings, why not try hiding the JSON+LD markup again and seeing if that helps dramatically?

Cheers!

– Brook

[Michael]

Brook you’re amazing! Thank you! Your updated code fixed the issue, the month loads in just a few seconds now, thank you thank you!

-Michael

[Brook]

What news! I am happy to hear this.

I want to explain the “bug” that is causing your slowness. Due to an oversight in our planning JSON+LD is not cached when you enable month view caching. So each time the page reloads it has to rebuild the JSON+LD section.

We are working to cache JSON+LD in the future, which will eliminate this issue. In the mean time, simply disabling it as you did is a great solution. This section is often not used or needed.

One thing I want to mention, on occasion the page will still take a while to load. Each time you add or update an event, the cache must be rebuilt and the page will slow one time. But once it gets rebuilt, it will be fast for all of your visitors again.

Please us me know if you ever need anything else. Cheers!

– Brook

[Author]

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