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WP Admin hangs when trying to add members to Moderators (5,500+ members on the site)

AD Alex D.
Alex D.
Member
Member since Jan 2012
4 posts
Jan 9, 2012 · 9:27 pm · Edited

Hi,

We are testing the latest Simple Forums 5.0.0 Build 7705 on our shared server and are running into issues with member groups functions (specifically, Moderators -> Add Members) where application (apparently) attempts to load entire member list and hangs, making wp-admin inaccessible for a few mins. It then comes back up.

We do not have this problem with any member functions in WordPress itself or any other plugins, so it seems that the script is rather inefficient when dealing with large members list, in our case 5,500+.

We had experienced this problem early on when trying to add Admins, but I was able to fix it by creating custom PHP.ini and setting higher memory usage and execution time for PHP scripts. I tried increasing them again, but it doesn’t solve the problem for moderators selection.

Could you please look into stress testing the application in this area and maybe finding a way to load/select from member list more efficiently?

Thanks for your work on this great plugin. Cheers.

6 Answers

New Answer
MP Mr Papa
Mr Papa
Member
Member since Dec 2006
19,448 posts
Jan 9, 2012 · 9:32 pm

not sure I follow…  adding members to any usergroup only loads 100 users at a time and pages through them…  so your overall usergroup size does not matter…

and we do ‘stress test’ it… we test with our user database which currently has over 7000 members…  and no issue…

in fact, in 5.0, we changed the add admins to use the the exact same way of adding new members – no more than 100 fetched at a time because there was indeed the problem with adding admins of loading too many users where it could take some time…

so if its taking your site a long time to load 100 users, something else is afoot…

AD Alex D.
Alex D.
Member
Member since Jan 2012
4 posts
Jan 9, 2012 · 11:29 pm

Yes, the member list loading issue that we experienced (and were able to fix) was in the previous version, I didn’t realize you changed it… thanks for clarification.

Still, the hanging issue is essentially the same on the surface of it. We’ll try to run some more tests to see if we can figure it out. Any suggestions would be welcome. Thanks!

YS Yellow Swordfish
Yellow Swordfish
Member
Member since Nov 2008
16,437 posts
Jan 10, 2012 · 3:09 am

Not sure I have any suggestions to be honest. As Steve said it seems to be performing pretty well here with our 7000 membership pool but I am sure Steve would be interested to hear of anything you find that might be having an adverse effect.

MP Mr Papa
Mr Papa
Member
Member since Dec 2006
19,448 posts
Jan 10, 2012 · 8:40 pm

now, your topic/posts said ‘adding a member’…  perhaps you are really referring to displaying the current membership??

AD Alex D.
Alex D.
Member
Member since Jan 2012
4 posts
Jan 10, 2012 · 9:13 pm

Mr Papa said

now, your topic/posts said ‘adding a member’…  perhaps you are really referring to displaying the current membership??

Basically, the hangup occurs when I do the following:

  1. Log in to wp-admin
  2. Select Forums -> User Groups -> Manage User Groups. Three groups are shown (Guests, Members, Moderators)
  3. Click “Add Members” under “Moderators”. The blue square “loading” graphic appears and never stops.
  4. At this point, any function in WP admin (not just Forum) is inaccessible. When you click on any link, browser displays “Connecting…” in the status bar and nothing happens. About 3-4 mins later WP Admin is working again.

I’ll post here if I find what is causing this. Even if it doesn’t relate to sp-forum plugin scripts, people still might run into similar probs on shared hosts.

YS Yellow Swordfish
Yellow Swordfish
Member
Member since Nov 2008
16,437 posts
Jan 11, 2012 · 4:46 am

Absolutely and we would welcome any knowledge – especially if it can lead to an improvement.
I did just try that same process here with our current user base of 7160 members and have to say there were no such problems. The first 100 users were loaded into the select list within about half a second.

If you are able it might be worth running the SQL query being used against your database in phpMyAdmin (for example) which might show up if there is a data problem of some sort.