Urgent help needed – TEC timing out website

[Matthew]

Hi,

Over the last couple of days I’m having huge problems with the events calendar taking a very long time to load and slowing the rest of the site. Today it got worse and I can’t get the front end or backend of wordpress to load most of the time, when it does it takes often more than 1 minute.

I deactivated all other plugins and the problem persists. If I deactivate the events calendar the site runs fine. When I check the events page on pingdom it’s taking > 60s too load (actually its not loading at all often) –
https://nimbus.everhelper.me/client/notes/share/308924/OvbRZMImNlIDR83THXN7KlFsQvFxA95P/

Can anyone help me with this?

[Matthew]

Hi,

Ok it seems to be working again:
https://nimbus.everhelper.me/client/notes/share/309014/ARGTBOn61XrOhxlyloLA94MZ9Gs0HVU8/

Now the events archive only takes about 3 seconds to load.

I just wondering if you guys know what has been happening this week? It was doing the same thing on my staging and live site and again it was with all other plugins deactivated. When TEC was deactivated both the staging and the live were running fine. I called my hosting and they say everything looks fine on their end.

Any thoughts?

[George]

Hey Matthew,

I’m really sorry to hear about all of this. I’m curious: how many events do you have on your site?

[Matthew]

There was 3300 when I was having the issue. I deleted 1000 that had passed since this morning…

[George]

Thanks Matthew!

While that is a sizable number of events, it’s not “extreme” or an amount that The Events Calendar shouldn’t be able to handle. If there were all, for example, in literally one month, then that would by pretty intensive…

But regardless, the only way things would have taken nearly a minute to load, with your relatively-normal number of events, is something specific to your server environment. I know that you mention your web host saying that “everything looked good” on their end, but The Events Calendar itself can handle a few thousand events without issue.

How are you hosting your event, specifically? Is it with a shared webhost like GoDaddy, for example? Are you hosting on your own private server or something?

Also, it appears like you’ve been using The Events Calendar on your site for quite some time now, for several versions. Is this correct? And if so, have there ever been any similar performance issues to this, or was this literally a case of simply updating the plugin and then immediately you had performance issues?

Thank you!
George

[Matthew]

Hi George,

I’m on Managed WordPress with Godaddy – I can’t afford wpengine yet unfortunately.

This is the first time I’ve had an issue. Like you I initially thought hosting and that’s why I called them, but the website was working fine when TEC was disabled (actually, this may be that it was loading cached versions come to think of it).

I wasn’t on the latest version until yesterday I think (I updated to see if that was the problem but it made no difference).

I get the impression you think this was a hosting problem? I think so too but if I’m going to take action on it if it happens again I’d like to be sure. Is there a reason why it would affect the events archive and single event views from TEC more than other pages if it was a hosting problem?

Thanks,
Mat

[George]

Hey @Matthew,

I want to be clear that I am not saying The Events Calendar is free of any role in this slowing down of things – I hope that my writing didn’t come off that way!

There is likely a combination of things causing all of this.

For what it’s worth, whenever I go to your URL the site loads fine for me. There are some times delays of a few seconds, but for me these happen even on e.g. your site’s homepage which is not an Events Archive or Event view…do you agree with this at all, or find anything similar to what I’m describing? I don’t discount your claims at all! I just mean that I have not been able to recreate them; pages on your site across the board are a tiny bit slow for me, but this is relatively uniform and not unique to Events pages. I do not find anything like the behavior you describe where everything works fine but then the Events pages take a minute to load.

To further investigate if there’s a code-based issue here, one thing that might be very helpful is to see if any errors pop up on your site if you head to your site’s wp-config.php file and change this line of code:

define('WP_DEBUG', false);

to this:

define('WP_DEBUG', true);

That will display PHP errors if any exist, which might be quite useful here.

Let me know what you think, and what you find if you do the wp-config.php step mentioned above 🙂

Thank you!
George

[Matthew]

Hi George,

Thanks for your reply. Since posting this I have discussed the issue with my hosting provider. The issue was mainly on the staging site and only temporarily on the live site (which is why you couldn’t recreate the issue). It happened for a few days and then stopped. The tech I spoke with believes my hosting plan is not good enough and it just manifests the most significantly on the events archive as that page makes a lot of requests on the server (I think that was how he put it).

Like I said, TEC has been working fine for months so I think it probably is the hosting. Thanks for the debug tip. I’ll run that later this week when the developers are finished as I don’t want to risk breaking anything while they’re still working – I’m not very good with code and have been know to break the site 🙂

Thanks again for your time, the TEC support forum has always been really helpful and this occasion is no exception.

Cheers,
Mat

[George]

Hey Mat,

First of all, thanks so much for the kind words at the close of your reply there. Thank you! 😀

As for your issues, I think your tech described things perfectly:

The tech I spoke with believes my hosting plan is not good enough and it just manifests the most significantly on the events archive as that page makes a lot of requests on the server (I think that was how he put it).

I want to underscore again that we do have many, many improvements to make in terms of performance and it’s one of our biggest goals for the coming year – to drastically improve performance of The Events Calendar and its add-ons! So stay tuned to The Events Calendar updates regardless, issues like this should happen less often regardless of your hosting as we improve the plugin.

Since this thread is marked “resolved”, I’ll close it up for now – if other issues arise, open a new thread any time. And until then: best of luck with your site!

George

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