Page speed / Page Load issues

[Kevin]

We’ve been working on this issue for several weeks now. We reached out to support, searched through the forums, talked to the host (WP Engine) and we are at a loss.

What we are seeing is that SLP is running queries on almost every page load. We’ve blocked all plugins related to SLP from loading on every page except for the main SLP plugin and there’s no sign of it in the browser (no js or anything like that) running.  But we still see a large number of rows added on some page views into tables like wp_3_slp_rep_query_results and in wp_3_slp_rep_query. We are clearing out anything older than 30 days using a cron script and yet one site has over 6 million rows and anther has over 3 million for just one of these tables.

We have this setup to run on ONE page on each domain and we can’t figure out why SLP is logging queries on almost every page load. When we got with WP Engine they noticed that SL Premier  and  Store Locator Plus were both making a very large amount of admin-ajax.php calls.

SLP support said this should not be the case but that’s definitely what we are seeing. It seems that somehow things are loading on every page load even though they shouldn’t be.

Has anyone run into this before? Is there any caching issues with hosts like WP Engine that we should be aware of? Is there a hook or filter that may be running on every page load that stores a location query? The site gets a fair amount of visits and this constant writing to the database appears to be table locking and causing usage to spike up so visitors are having to wait anywhere from 8-20 seconds for page loads.

I want to make it clear we aren’t blaming SLP – it could obviously be a plugin conflict of some sort or any number of things. We are just following the data and right now it seems to point to something in or around SLP.

We have 2 domains running SLP in our multi-site network and both sites are experiencing the same issue. Here is where one of them is running: https://blueseal.com/where-to-buy/

It should only run on that page but when we visit other page son the site we still see the tables getting written to as outlined above.

Here is the plugin environment information:

Store Locator Plus®:5.3

Experience:5.2.11 Version 5.3.2 in production

Power:5.2.5 Version 5.3.2 in production
+Pages

Premier:5.2.11 Version 5.3.2 in production

Janitor:4.9

Site URL:https://blueseal.com

This Info Cached:1582140349

Network Active:Yes

WordPress Version:5.3.2

PHP Version:7.3.15-3+ubuntu18.04.1+deb.sury.org+1

MySQL Version:5.7.28

PHP Limit:512M

WordPress General Limit:64M

WordPress Admin Limit:512M

PHP Peak RAM:2 MB

PHP Post Max Size:256M

 

 

• This topic was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by Cici.
• This topic was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by Cici.

[Cici]

I believe the developer answered this in support.

You are not using the most current versions. Make sure you have a back-up of your site and update to latest versions in production.

For others who may read this the answer from the SLP developer:

“This statement is an AJAX object definition, not a URL call.
var slp_experience = {“ajaxurl”:”https:\/\/blueseal.com\/wp-admin\/admin-ajax.php”};

Any SLP calls made to the back end will be an XHR call.

These are the only XHR calls on blueseal.com: (Screenshot of their site inspection calls”

However there IS a cached version of a munged JavaScript environment that is loading the SLP Experience add-on widget JavaScript to every page. While this will load the code into the browser, it will not fire off a back end request without direct user interaction.

It’s presence with no SLP widget on the page indicates the JavaScript code-compiler and minification process related to this caching system is not setup properly and at a minimum needs to be flushed to get the proper active environment for each page on the site.

[Kevin]

Cici,

Thanks for the reply. As I mentioned in the post we were able to remove the ajax javascript and that’s not the issue and appreciate the help you gave via email as well.

How we are determining that something is loading on every page is by watching the database. Every pad load ads new entries with our IP address to the database.  This munged / compiled version sounds promising though, as the site is on WP Engine and and we were wondering if any special exceptions would need to be made to exclude anything related to SLP or if it’s the caching plugin. We’ve manually cleared the cache several times while testing so something must still be munging that.

We’ll look into caching and if that doesn’t sort it out we’ll check back. Thanks! We’ll also make sure we get the plugins updated. We usually do that on a weekly basis anyway.

[Kevin]

FYI, we’ve confirmed it’s not caching. The script is only loading on the one page and no others. But something is still writing to the database on other pages besides the Where to Buy page. For BlueSeal.com one of the 3 sites in our network, it writes to these two tables on several page loads and not just the Where to Buy pageHere are the two tables: wp_3_slp_rep_query_results and wp_3_slp_rep_query.

We’ll get the plugins updated ASAP and let you know if that stops the behavior.

Also, would like to be clear we are not blaming SLP, just looking for help since you know the plugin better than we do. We can’t figure out why it’s writing to the database so often and we don’t have any custom code for the site. We are using several off the shelf plugins but no modifications of our own to SLP or any other plugins for that matter. Could be a plugin conflict, could be any number of things. We are just in the process of trying to understand what’s happening so we can figure out the best solution for our case. We’ve searched quite a bit and don’t see this happening to other people and we just have no idea why it’s happening in our case either. Our host pointed out that the database writes appear to be causing the server slow down, we tracked it to the tables above and now we have no idea how this is happening every several page loads and not just the Where to Buy were SLP is lcoated.

Hope that extra information helps and any ideas you have for things for us to check would be much appreciated. I’ll update again after we get the plugins updated.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by Kevin.

[Cici]

Ok. The developer , Lance is experienced also with databases,server configuration, Application architecture, design, and development and all the technical aspects that I am NOT. 🙂

So if you come to a FULL stop and want or need to hire him separately ,shoot an email to support and we can provide you a link for non-SLP support services. Of course if you pay him to troubleshoot and the issue is with the SLP plug-in or SLP add-on he will make it right with no cost to you.

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