Alternate Feed stopped working suddenly

Can you please share a link to your alternate feed so that I can see it?

One other thing to check is how many posts your feed is set to show–the default (under Settings > Reading) is 10, but if you’ve increased that, it might cause issues.

Hi, Robin —

I figured it out, after a lot of trial and error —?and you were indeed on the right path. The RSS was set on 5. It worked fine up til this past post, which happened to be a rather long one with a lot of images. The main RSS feed still worked, but the plugin’s custom feed did NOT. So after checking a bunch of other things, I came back to the reading settings and reduced it down to 2 posts, and it no longer timed out. Seems to be okay now.

However, it’d be nice to know what the issue is. Is the number of images? Length of combined posts in the most recent feed items? I assume leaving it at 2 will be fine for MailChimp checking the RSS feed every day as long as we have no more than 1 or 2 posts per day. But it’d be nice to allow a longer RSS feed for other users outside of our custom feed. Or maybe that doesn’t really matter. ??

Things I looked at were PHP versions, plugin conflicts, so on… our host currently limits 64M for PHP for so not sure if that has anything to do with timing out.

Thanks!

Without knowing the number for sure, my guess is that it is the number of images, combined with the length of the post. There is not a truly efficient way to parse the full content feed and each image is evaluated and (usually) replaced, so it’s possible that the alternate feed timed out. I haven’t actually had the issue come up before, honestly.

An alternative might be that if you consistently post longer posts with lots of images, to set the feed to be summaries only, and send out just that in your emails. The email would be just the featured image and initial excerpt of your post, with a link back to your site. Processing the excerpts is a very different procedure and is much less intensive. Some users prefer to share only excerpts in their emails/feeds so they can encourage visitors to come to the site.

Thanks. They have posts every so often that have ~20 images — it’s a home decor shop/blog, so they do a fair number of these. I think in that one instance, there were a few in the feed that were of the longer variety, causing the timeout.

Do you think this would this be a PHP memory limit issue perhaps? Or at least something that might be mitigated by more resources provided on the hosting end? We plan to move from their current host as they’re terrible, and will probably be able to allocate more memory for them as well. I suppose I can test that out when we get to that point and report back, if that’s helpful. ??

The summary idea is a welcome suggestion but probably not what they’re going to want to do. So far it seems to be working fine with 2 items in the feed since they never have more than one post a day, and MailChimp checks daily for new posts to scrape.

It could be an issue on the hosting end which might be alleviated with more resources. I don’t know a hard/fast number for how many images is too many, but it’s an issue that has been reported very rarely. If you do make hosting changes and discover that it helps resolve the issue, yes please, I would very much appreciate a report back. Thank you!