WP Admin area very slow after activating plugin

[Jay]

Hello,

Sorry to bother you guys but I didn’t see a solution after a reasonable amount of searching through your forums.

I have installed the Events Calendar plugin (3.9.1) and am running it on WordPress 4.1.1. It works but it significantly slows down the dashboard area. The admin area takes about an additional 20-30 seconds to load whenever this plugin is activated and it slows down things such as making a new post, etc. This occurs even with all other plugins deactivated and when using the default WP 2014 theme.

I am in a hosting environment with a very strict firewall so I suspect that we might need to open it up to a Modern Tribe IP range to get this to work properly and avoid a slowdown?

I’ve tried to activate the Pro version of the plugin and I’m getting a validation error message. Can you let me know which IPs need to be unblocked in order for your plugins to communicate freely without interference from a firewall?

[Barry]

Hi Jay,

Sorry to hear you’ve been suffering such a slowdown.

I’m curious – did this happen instantly without you even having added events? Or was it after a large body of events were built up that you began to notice this issue (if so, can you tell how many events you have, approximately)?

Also, just for the avoidance of any doubt, can you confirm this is happening with only The Events Calendar (or is it when Events Calendar PRO is activated that you see this)?

I am in a hosting environment with a very strict firewall so I suspect that we might need to open it up to a Modern Tribe IP range to get this to work properly and avoid a slowdown?

If you’re seeing a general slowdown in the admin environment then I don’t think this will help (with the performance aspect of the problem) – neither plugin relies on communication with our own servers to operate correctly.

The only case where this is needed is the plugin license screen and, by extension, the plugin and update admin screens. If for some reason your hosting environment impedes communication with external URLs that could cause some amount of slowdown in those specific cases.

I’ve tried to activate the Pro version of the plugin and I’m getting a validation error message.

So it sounds like you have activated it successfully (and, if so, it will work as expected and you won’t have any problems using PRO-specific features and functionality) but you have not been able to validate the license, which is needed for automated updates (though you can alternatively update by grabbing the most recent version of the plugin from the downloads page).

If you like you can try whitelisting the IP address 162.243.159.176 – however do note that we can’t guarantee that will remain the same indefinitely.

[Jay]

I’m getting the slowdown with or without the Pro version enabled.

This problem happened immediately after installing the plugin. I have no events scheduled now. I was having the same problem on a testing server with a handful of events (maybe 8).

I have no reoccurring events.

FYI- I’m running this off of a dedicated server within a professional hosting facility. Everything works fine other than this plugin.

I passed your IP address along to our hosting facility to have them unblock it. Hopefully this will help.

Is there someplace I can look in the developer tools of Chrome to figure out which script is causing this to hang?

[Barry]

If you suspect the problem is with a frontend script, for instance, yes you could check out Chrome’s developer tools and use its Audit and Profile facilities.

However, if the slowdown is (for instance) the result of database queries then this is unlikely to provide much in the way of useful information.

FYI- I’m running this off of a dedicated server within a professional hosting facility. Everything works fine other than this plugin.

That makes this even stranger, since many users have great success running our plugins with far more events in some pretty regular and inexpensive shared hosting accounts. Certainly we don’t see many reports of problems where merely activating the plugin causes such a slowdown.

Is there anything further you can tell me about your hosting setup in terms of how many sites it hosts, which operating system is in use and any details about available memory, etc?

[Jay]

I had my hosting team unblock the IP address you specified but I am still getting a message “Sorry, key validation server is not available.” when trying to activate the license. I can’t get anything to load on the Event Add-Ons section (just a grey screen with a “Rate The Events Calendar” message at the bottom. I am also getting a message “RSS Error: WP HTTP Error: connect() timed out!” under News From Modern Tribe on the main WP Dashboard.

I had our hosting team unblock the IP you specified for ports 80 and 443. Do I need to open up any other ports for RSS stuff, etc?

I’ll double check the server specs, but I want to eliminate the blocked feeds as a contributing factor because I’ve had similar issues with other plugins causing a slowdown when their communications ports are blocked.

[Barry]

It certainly seems that there are connectivity issues specifically with our server. Can I ask you (or one of your hosting team) to provide some more information about your hosting environment, as requested in my last reply?

Is there anything further you can tell me about your hosting setup in terms of how many sites it hosts, which operating system is in use and any details about available memory, etc?

This and any other details (such as the web server that is in use) could all be useful since most users are completely unaffected by these issues. It would be great if we could identify any commonality between those who are impacted.

Thanks!

[Barry]

…Sorry I missed one of your questions: communication is via ports 80 and 443, nothing else should be needed (in relation to key validation, our RSS feeds etc).

[Jay]

FYI- we are able to ping the IP address you specified but still don’t get the Modern Tribe RSS feed to show up or the add-ons section to work.

# ping -c 1 162.243.159.176
PING 162.243.159.176 (162.243.159.176) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 162.243.159.176: icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=80.9 ms

— 162.243.159.176 ping statistics —
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 81ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 80.962/80.962/80.962/0.000 ms

Does Modern Tribe have a different IP for their news that is different than the Events Calendar stuff?

[Jay]

Here are some of the server specs:

Dedicated server: 2 cpu, 8gb Ram, running up-to-date apache/mySQL/CentOS.

Let me know if you need the exact versions, etc. I think this is a firewall configuration problem since none of the feeds are coming into WordPress and I get a timeout message.

[Barry]

Hi Jay,

With regards to the RSS feeds – this turns out to be a known bug and one that will be fixed once the next release goes out. Would it be possible for you to deactivate the dashboard widget in question (via Screen Options) until this is resolved in a future version of The Events Calendar?

The key validation server itself may be indeed be caused by a firewall-related issue – and what I’m going to do next of all is ask my colleague Brian to step in as he has been working on a set of related issues along these lines.

That aside, something puzzling is the issue with the event editor loading slowly. I can’t bring to mind any reasons why The Events Calendar/Events Calendar PRO by themselves would “dial home” or even attempt to access any external URLs in that scenario, so it’s possible this is in fact a separate and unrelated problem. Does this only occur in the event editor and does it also impact single, non-recurring events?

Thanks again for your patience, Jay – and Brian will be along to help further with the key validation issues.

[Brian]

This reply is private.

[Jay]

Thanks for the help!

I got the following error message for tri.be:

Response
Checking URL: http://tri.be/

Error Found ( connect() timed out! )

WP_Error Object
(
[errors:WP_Error:private] => Array
(
[http_request_failed] => Array
(
[0] => connect() timed out!
)

)

[error_data:WP_Error:private] => Array
(
)

)
Response Code ( )

Response Message ( )

Can you provide the IP(s) for that? Is it just 50.116.28.27 or is there a range that I should unblock? I got code 80 (OK) for the Events Calendar URL.

Also, I tried removing the RSS feed under “Screen Options” but it didn’t was still slow. My main problem is that the dashboard homepage runs really slow. Stuff within the Events Calendar plugin is maybe a little sluggish but I notice a big slowdown on my main admin page after I activate the plugin. Maybe unblocking tri.be will solve?

[Brian]

Both tri.be and theeventscalendar.com should be whitelisted.

I have these two ip addresses for the sites:

162.243.159.176

50.116.28.27

A timed out connection means it cannot find tri.be in 5 seconds I will see if I can update the validate plugin and enable you to adjust that timeout to see if at anytime it is able to connect.

In the mean time you can try running a plugin like Query Monitor:

Query Monitor – The developer tools panel for WordPress

It will let you know the bad connections and slow queries running on each page. The information in that might help us get to the bottom of this.

Thanks

[Jay]

Unblocking the IP for Modern Tribe fixed the problem. The site is running smoothly now. Thanks for all of your help!

Thanks,

Jay

[Jay]

Help! My standard users get a blank white page when they try to edit posts when The Events Calendar is activated. Admin users are not affected. Is there a way that I can give non-admin users full access to The Events Calendar stuff? I think this would fix the problem.

[Author]

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