Unknown Entries In MySQL Database

Those are transients.

What are those? Are they supposed to be there?

Yes and yes. Read the link I provided. The answer to your questions is in the first sentence on the page.

Is it possible to disable them? It uses up lots of MySQL storage and when I clear some options in WP-Options table I always see tons of transients and its really annoying. If I remove them they keep coming up. Can you give me easy step by step instructions?

Annoying is one thing, but is it actually causing any harm? Remember, it is a caching mechanism. In principal, it should be increasing performance. I don’t if you can globally disable the feature, but I wouldn’t without really understanding it.

You can’t disable all of them, but you could probably disable most of them by deactivating all of your plugins and using WordPress without any plugins. WordPress itself doesn’t create very many transients; but a lot of plugins use transients to store data.

I don’t use plugins that are useless. I use all of my plugins. Is it possible to remove them? I don’t really care about caching.

Is it possible to remove them?

No, you cannot.

I don’t really care about caching.

No offense, sincerely, but you seem to care about the transient database entries for what I am tempted call aesthetic reasons, rather than reasons that have to do with how well your site functions. That doesn’t make much sense.

I have limited MySQL database storage and when I delete the entries I seem to clear some memory.

I seem to have run into the same problem. The options table in the DB of one of my sites has bloated to nearly 60 MB which I would expect to be about 1 or 2 MB max. It’s not a large site, the posts table is about 2.3 MB, and it’s hosted low budget. The size of the options table now effectively breaks the site because the DB size has gone over the allowed size of the low budget provider.

Speed is nice but if one day it is going to break your site up like this, I don’t see the advantage. A ticking time bomb…

Or is this bloating an indication of some faulty plugin? I’ve yet to find the plugins that is causing all these transient entries.

From the API documentation I gather these entries are temporary but who/what will actually take care of clearing expired ones form the database? Should WP be doing this or is it left to the plugin that spawned all of them into the DB in the first place?

Thanks for any info on this subject ??

UPDATE: I found the plugin that spawned all the transient entries ( see https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/plugin-google-analytics-dashboard-over-50mb-of-transient-data-in-my-wp_options-table?replies=1 ) but no clue as to why expired entries are not cleared from the table…

Clearing the table with the MySQL query:

DELETE FROM 'wp_options' WHERE 'option_name' LIKE ('_transient_%')

did solve the immediate size problem but I fear I’ll have to do without the plugin to prevent buildup again…