Let’s do the second one first… This is something that took a while to work out as it only affected a small handful if people. There is a fix posted here: https://simple-press.com/support-forum/sp5-general-topics/is_plugin_active-error/#p156009 – post #3 – if you could app;y that all should be well and is fixed up in the next update.

As to the first issue I am initially a little stumped. Are you using the recent posts widget? If so you can see from our own site here that it really should not show any particular sluggishness and is, of course one of the most popular items in the template tags plugin.

So – as we have no known issues or other reports of problems with the widget let;s start with basics. Do you have any other widgets in use and do they all perform normally? And perhaps I should ask if there is a chance of a link to your forum page so we can take a look?

Hi Yellow Swordfish,

thanks for the fast response. That makes a good feeling!

On 2)

I have read the post you linked and understand, that this will be fixed with the coming update, so I will refrain from changing the PHP, as I plan to go “live” with the new forum not before december.

I am no fan of individual changes in php and css, as I try to keep my installation as “standard” as possible to prevent unintended side effects.My whole installation is without one single individual line and I am doing fine with it – only expections: wp-config and htaccess.

So I will wait for the next version

On 1)

Sure you could have a link, but I guess it will not help, as the forum is not “live”, I am testing it in the background – unseen to users.

And I cant give you access to the installation, as this is the “Live” Site with paying Users on. But if just taking a look will help, I will gladly send you the link, just provide me with an email, for correspondence.

Btw I must correct what I said above. On the Test-Installation, the performance problem when accessing the Main Page does *not* exist. And the plugins on the Test Installation are *completely identical*. So it seems not related to a simple plugin incompatibility.

What is different, is that the SQL database on the test installation is nearly empty, where on the live installation it is roughly 100MB.

Yes, I try to use the “recent post widget”. And what I recognize is, that even on the “complete empty” test installation, when klicking on the “post link” of a “recent post”, it needs 8 Seconds to load the forum with just one! post! This is not good.

But on the Live installation, I can absolutly confirm, that in the moment I activate “Template Tags and Widgets” as a plugin, a call of the Main URL results in load times of 30 seconds and more! Any further klick, for example to return into the simple:press options, needs 30 seconds again. This is completely weird!

I fully understand, that you cant just create a solution from thin air. What I need is help to nail the problem down step by step. Again, everything looks fine, until I activate this plugin.

Let me give you some more data:

PHP 5.4

SQL 100 MB (with Mingle Forum tables included)

Members imported into Simple:Press as “users” – 1400 (just 400 of them are forum users and just 100 of them truely active)

Forums – just one yet – for test purposes only

Posts – just five yet – for test purposes only

No further migration of old posts yet – Mingle Forum runs in parallel

Forum Page is “restriced” to certain levels via S2 Members Membership plugin

One weird idea:

Just a hunch: Is it possible, that the recent post plugin has a bug that creates a “loop” if it configured for example for showing 20 posts, but these 20 are not there? ..

Most users would not recognize that, because they activate the plugin with a loaded forum, I test it, with a forum nearly empty. Again, just a hunch.

Hope it helps, what should I check next? Do you need the Link?

Thanks, Michael

Shouldn’t be but it is an intriguing idea, So if you only have 5 posts try reducing the number in the widget see what happens…

Additional Info:

It seems to be a load problem. Look at the images below from todays load on the live system, both peaks were the times, when I activated the plugin. Then deactivated afterwards.

I testet this at 21:05 – 21:08 MEZ again, and will have the overview on a minute by minute basis later after 22:00. Will post it here then.

Hope it helps. Looks like a “loop” causing massive load.

PS: Changed to 1 post in the widget – no change. The problem seems to be more serious, see below:

Maybe I found it. Still weird, but ….

as I said, I have Mingle Forum “Live” running. And I am using a “Recent Post” widget from Mingle on the Live site.

So I had another “hunch”. I deactivated the Mingle “Recent Post” Widget and activated “Simple Press Recent Post Widget”.

Result: No Issue! :facepalm.

I am one of the first with a master in computer science here in germany, graduated in the early 80s, so you could say I have quite some experience and could enroll at NASA to program Voyager in Assembler and Fortran (lol) ….. but I still find something puzzling new every month in the IT world. Weird!

So the problem moves down in priority, but is still there. And I still would like you to take a look.

Because it “should not” exist, as Mingle and Simple:Press are in completly seperated SQL areas.It seems, that the “parallel” usage of some wordpress code, seems to create the “loop”.

It is still a problem, because it hinders my migration strategy. I had no intend to migrate all posts from Mingle to Simple:Press, but to run the both forums in parallel, so that “old” posts could still be checked in Mingle for quite some time.

So it would be nice, if you give it a thought, if there is a solution to run both widgets in parallel.

But luckily the problem is not the same priority any more. It now moved from “Showstopper” to “Annoyance”.

Thanks!

So these peaks were just when it was activated? Not when the page was loaded? A forum such as SP is always going to be quite heavy because of the dynamic nature and the level of sophistication, But it looks to me like there is something else going in there.

It;s quite a small number of users and not really a huge database – although experience shows that SP scales very well.

A couple of things do occur however – although this is unlikely to be the reason fr the slow widget.

Firstly do make sure that in Options > Global the CSS and JS combination and caching are turned on if they are not. Also also make sure you have the avatars set up correctly (profiles > avatars). If you are using Gravatars – install our gravatars cache plugin as that makes an enormous difference,

Additional: I should also ask what sort of hosting you are using…

We had some overlap. Take a look at 6 🙂

How curious. (My two suggestions are still worth following up of course).
Take a look in the SP error log (Toolbox). See if anything makes any sense.

I took a look in the SP Error Log: No Entries (just some “Notices” but unrelated to the time I activated)

The peaks in the load are not, when I activate the plugin, but when I call the Main Page. I confirmed this now with the minute view on Load.

And gravatars are not used and the caching is turned on. Again, the installation is still on near zero posts.

So what happens seems to be obvious now:

When the main page of the blog loads, it tries to load the “recent Mingle Posts” AND the “recent Simple:Press Posts”. And that seems to cause the loop. Deactivating the widget of either one, makes the trick. Either of them causes below 1 second for display. So both work like a charm when used alone. But both together, somehow “block” each other and “loop” for almost 30 seconds on heavy load.

Obviously there must be some interdependency, where both plugins use some “bottleneck” in wordpress, that causes this behaviour.

It is beyond my reach to guess about the cause. Only you know, what function this widget is using.

well, we know what our widget is using, but not the mingle one… and of course there is no loop per se…  and like you not sure what between the two would cause them struggle with each other…  

do you have any access to mysql profiling tools?  would be curious to see if its a query or other…  even the wp debug facility with some of the add on plugins for monitoring performance might provide some insight…

what storage engine are you using in mysql?  myisam or innodb?   the latter is better from performance standpoint and locking mechanism within mysql…   if the former, perhaps you could try our conversion tool for moving to innodb and see if any different…

a lot of questions and a lot of work to chase for a cause. I guess you know that and this message might be the intention of your questions.

The answer is simple. As the priority of the problem dropped to “annoyance”, there is no justification in spending valuable lifetime in chasing, what cannot be immediately narrowed down by you.

So either you have an immediate idea, what could be a concrete candidate for such an interdependency. If yes, I am willing to do some further, limited testing. Otherwise I dont have the time to search for a needle in a haystack.

So I will rest the case for now. Hopefully, this symptom is not just the tip of a bigger iceberg.

I think I can only echo what Mr Papa said above. The code for the widget really is very straightforward and simple and yes – we don’t know the Mingle code at all.

I would have thought the only point of contention would be the WordPress ‘users’ table but mySQL should be able to cope with that with no problem.

The point Mr Papa made regarding storage engines is a good one however. I do not know your knowledge level with mySQL but MyISAM tables (the usual default) do perform whole table locking when they are accessed whereas innoDB tables perform row level locking. Having said that, of course, one doubts that there should be any writing to the DB during a recent posts listing. And for such small amounts of data one would also assume that it should be available in mySQL’s rather efficient cache.

I fully agree. And I fully understand and accept, that you have no crystal ball either.

For me, it is just not worth the time, to search in the dark for a problem, that is just “annoying”. 

Life is too short for that and I am of an age, that understands that well 😉

Thanks for your help. The matter is closed from my side – as long as it doesnt pop up somewhere else 😉