wpengine repeatedly Failed smoke tests with ECPro

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  • #958523
    communityanswers
    Participant

    Currently our website, communityanswers.org, runs ECP and has repeatedly failed wpengine’s testing after every WordPress update is applied. This has happened 4 times so far and retesting under different environments, with other plug ins disabled, continues to fail the tests. Clone sites WITHOUT ECP do not fail these tests. Following is a more complete explanation from our wpengine engineer:

    “Foster’s explanation of how our smoke test works is spot on. We push the update and run a curl test to see if the server responds with a 200 OK. If the response is something other than that, it will fail. Unfortunately there is no log where we can see specifically why this failed. Since it has been a few days since the incident happened, the only real difference I can see between all of your installs and the parent one for ctanswers7979 is the the parent install has logged errors in the Apache Error log pertaining to long running php processes timing out. In particular, our kill script that looks for long running php processes has caught the following URL multiple times:
    201 /event/greenwich-faces-the-great-war-exhibition-at-historic
    The number on the left hand side indicates how many times that particular request has been caught by our script.”

    I’ve not found this problem on your site or the forums and we wonder if this is the reason for an extraordinary long time to load our calendar. If you were to go to our site at communityanswers.org and click on the calendar icon, you will wait a significant time period.

    Please advise us as to what can be done to try to track down this problem.

    #958728
    Josh
    Participant

    Hey,

    Thanks for reaching out to us!

    So, when WPEngine does automatic updates for your site, the automated smoketest feature which ensures the site is running properly shows errors when The Events Calendar Pro is active? The other side of the problem is the overall slow performance of the calendar?

    I took a quick look at your site and noticed that you do have a lot of events to display on the site. Here are a couple of thoughts that may help with the smoketest issue as well as the slow performance.

    1. When creating recurring events that go on indefinitely, maybe limit the end date to be a couple of months from the start rather than having a recurring event set for longer periods of time.
    2. Try cleaning up some old events by having older events deleted after a certain period of time. We do have this setting available in the plugin settings. The setting currently has a bug which doesn’t allow the events to be deleted automatically but this will be fixed in the upcoming release and would be a good setting to have set. This would potentially really help the smoketest issue since the event shown above in the tech response is an event that has already passed.
    3. Do you have caching enabled on the site? We will have a built-in cache on the calendar which will be released in an upcoming release as well which may help to better the overall performance of the calendar on your site.

    Let me know if this helps.

    Thanks!

     

    #959664
    communityanswers
    Participant

    In reverse order:
    3 – we do have caching turned on. Will your upcoming events cache further speed things up?
    2 – we currently only have 2 years old events, but were hoping to maintain 3 years as we are a community calendar and are often requested to look at timing of planned events. Is this considered too much? and if so what number of events are recommended for ECP?
    1 – we only have a handful of long-term recurring events

    But our primary question remains unanswered: when we do upgrades, we do it on our live site AND on an exact clone site, with the only difference being that one has ECP and one does not as we only purchased 1 license. It is only on the live site with ECP that we fail the tests and have a slow response for our calendar. Is there a way to check if ECP is properly working in our environment? I redid all the tests you recommended (except for the twentyfourteen theme) with all plug ins deactivated and got the same results, i.e. failed smoke test and slow calendar response.

    Is there anything else that can be done to track this down?

    #959841
    Josh
    Participant

    Hey,

    Thanks for following up with us.

    We have a member on our team that has been in communication with and worked with the WP Engine team in the past over performance issues. I’ll reach out to him to see if he has any insight that would be helpful here.

    I apologize for the inconvenience so far and hopefully we can get some more information for you.

    Thanks!

    #961211
    communityanswers
    Participant

    Has there been any traction yet. We are facing more update shortly and wonder if you have identified the problem?

    #961710
    Josh
    Participant

    Hey,

    I apologize for the delayed response.

    On your clone sites that seem to function and upgrade normally, are they exact clones of the site that is failing? With this, I understand that you aren’t using PRO on the clone sites but is everything else identical? Are there the same number of events on your cloned sites as there are on the site that fails to update?

    At the root, it seems as if this issue is related to other performance based issues with WP Engine that are noted in threads such as https://wordpress.org/support/topic/long-queries-when-hosted-on-wpengine?replies=2. The time out described within your original post is what I’m assuming is causing the crawler not to return a “200” response and causing the upgrade to fail the smoketest.

    I apologize for the continued inconvenience that this issue has caused. I’m running some tests on my own WPEngine account using a large number of events, particularly a larger number of events within a single month. I would like to see if I can recreate the experience with the failing smoketest.

    Thanks!

    #961822
    communityanswers
    Participant

    To answer your question – yes, they are EXACT clones in at least 2 of the other sites – the only exception is an active ECPro license. In fact since this started happening 6 months ago, we generate the clones just a few hours prior to the update.

    After reading the forum you cited, it appears to me that they reference this problem as one with Events Calendar, NOT ECPro. We have not seen the failed smoke test with Events Calendar, but we do have a very slow response time when loading the calendar view.

    Other than changing hosts and that may create as yet unidentified other issues,
    1)is there a specific request I can make to WPEngine that you think may help?
    2)Do you recommend a maximum ceiling of events that may keep thinks running quickly?
    3)Also, will your upcoming events cache further speed things up?

    #962268
    Josh
    Participant

    Hey,

    Thanks for providing the additional information.

    When you say this started happening 6 months ago, were you able to have your site, including the Events Calendar PRO, automatically updated on WP Engine without the site failing? Were there any other changes that were made since then such as any new plugins or themes that were activated?

    I’ve got a site set up on WP Engine to test an automatic update. If I’m able to recreate the issue on their hosting, I would like to reach out to WP Engine directly concerning this issue. In that pursuit, would I have your permission to bring up your account with them as having the same issue?

    As far as performance with the next upgrade. The caching should help performance with many users. If performance and initial load is still a concern, an alternative would be to change the default view of the calendar from the month view to the list view since this greatly reduces the number of queries that are being performed in order to generate the initial view.

    Thanks!

     

    #962335
    communityanswers
    Participant

    Yes – we were able to have it updated EVEN THOUGH we received this message: “We attempted to automatically update your WordPress sites to version 4.1.2, but our tests did not pass on some or all of your installs. The specific failed test consists of checking your site before and after the update to ensure we receive a 200 (OK) response which usually confirms that no fatal errors have occurred.” HOWEVER, after we checked we saw that the site WAS updated despite this report. This seems to confuse many of the techs who looked at it and assumed that if the smoke test failed, the update would not go thru.

    Our site is very static in that there were NO NEW plug ins, etc. The only changes to our site is in the databases until required updates are needed. This has occurred with each update for the last 6-9 months.

    You certainly have our permission to refer to us as we have reached out to them each time.

    #962828
    Josh
    Participant

    Hey,

    So to clarify, the auto updates don’t fail, you just receive a notification that they fail but upon inspecting the site you see that it did automatically update as expected?

    Thanks!

    #963341
    communityanswers
    Participant

    Yes – the message states it failed AND that the update was not completed; however the update does go thru – go figure! This baffles wpengine also.They do confirm that the smoke test does fail for the live site only with ECPro.

    Virginia

    #964828
    Josh
    Participant

    Hey Virginia,

    Thanks for following up and clarifying. I apologize for the delay.

    The test site that I set up on WP Engine to test this successfully updated last week without any issue and got the following confirmation email message (https://cloudup.com/cT1X32dfxIy).

    Since the actual update is ultimately working on your install, I’m led to believe that this may actually be related to the performance struggles that we have seen and noted here with WP Engine sites in the past. In this case, my guess would be that the performance issue is giving a false positive and triggering the error message that you receive. However, it’s something that I wouldn’t be able to know for sure from this side.

    I’ll follow up with our team again tomorrow based on this new information to see what else we can do in this situation.

    Thanks!

    #984198
    Support Droid
    Keymaster

    This topic has not been active for quite some time and will now be closed.

    If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
    and one of the team will be only too happy to help.

Viewing 13 posts - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)
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