Hi @ddeveny ,
First of all, I would ask some preliminary questions. Kindly answer them:
1. I’m hoping you are using this plugin. Right?
2. Let me know what have you entered inside WP Admin > Ultimate Woo Auction > Settings > “Check Auction Status:” and “Auctions Processed Simultaneously:”?
3. You had mentioned that you ran 115 items for auctions. Did all end at same time?
4. What kind of hosting server are you using?
What I’m presuming the reason for this problem might be related to your hosting server configuration. Let me explain by backtracking what might have happened. As you have said, you are still receiving emails after 3.5 days, this means that your server was still processing those email requests 3.5 days after the auction end date. So, it took time to process all the email requests that came to it. Now why was it processing them so late? As you have said, no.of auctions were high i.e. 115 and I also presume that traffic on your site to bid on them might have been high too, so this might have generated many database queries to your database and since your hosting configuration (specifically DB connection pools) were not upto the mark to support high volume of DB queries, these queries/jobs were queued and were being executed by the server during those 3.5 days based on its performance and thus the delay.
Now, our advice to plugin users is that if they are planning good amount of auctions which are ending at same time and also expecting high traffic then at-least do below:
1. Should have a dedicated hosting server with better processing configuration. And having said that, there isn’t any benchmark numbers that we recommend but surely it should not be “shared hosting” or VPS.
2. Also, to control this delay, We have provided these params “Check Auction Status:” and “Auctions Processed Simultaneously:” to distribute the auction requests over a period of time so that longer queues to the server can be avoided. And thus server wont crash and better planning would lead to some delay but at-least in controlled fashion.
In terms of quick fix of suspending those delayed requests, we will do some research to see how can we provide that to admin.
Hope this answer helps you in getting an understanding to your problem.
Regards,
Nitesh
