Causing a white flash between page loads

  • I think this plugin is very good in serving its main purpose, to stop spam dead in its tracks. However, it seems to have become bloated and is the cause of a momentary blank white screen between page loads on two sites that I use it on. I’ve had to disable it on one because page load speed is critical on that site and this plugin sticks a fork in all that tedious optimization work that has gone into it.

    I am also not looking forward to contacting support. Have you seen the support form you have to fill out? And yes, I’ve read the FAQ. I have carefully crafted a server from the ground up and carefully chosen what plugins I have running. Even the caching mechanisms are completely different between the two. In fact, completely disabling caching did not help. And I disagree that Varnish causes a lot of problems. It does what it’s scripted to do and requires experience to set up. Your example points to someone who is setting up Varnish for the first time and doesn’t know VCL. In the end, with a healthy diverse plugin population between the two sites that are choking up, the common cause seems to point to this plugin.

    I hope this plugin will strive to be a good WordPress citizen once again and be mindful of its resource usage per HTTP request.

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  • Plugin Contributor redsand

    (@redsand)

    Hi hzc,

    I’m sorry to hear that you had issues with the plugin. We are happy to help you diagnose any issues you have.

    I understand your frustration about filling out the support form, but it literally takes no longer than it does to fill out this rating. In order to accurately diagnose issues, it requires certain information. Just like if you go to a doctor, they will questions to find out your symptoms, so they can accurately figure out what’s wrong in order to help you out. Along with your name, email and website, it asks for the plugin version, WordPress version, list of plugins active, and a message about what the issue is. Through 9 years of tech support on WordPress plugins we have found that these are necessary questions we would have to ask sooner or later anyhow.

    We will have to agree to disagree about Varnish then. Varnish is known to have issues with Cookies and PHP SESSIONS. It will have issues with many plugins or web software that use these. So it’s not specifically the plugin that isn’t compatible with Varnish…it’s the fact that Varnish can reduce PHP functionality and impact these very standard features of PHP that WP-SpamShield uses. There are over 700,000 Google results for “varnish issues” and there’s a reason for that. As with most things, it works very well when implemented according to its intended parameters, with a solid understanding of its strengths and weaknesses.

    I’m sorry that you feel the plugin uses extensive resources, but that simply doesn’t line up with the facts of how the plugin works. We have done extensive testing on the plugin and it is optimized for speed. We’ve done benchmarking on the plugin to back this up.

    Keep in mind that a common cause of site slowdowns is undiagnosed errors. If you have a white screen in WordPress, then one of the first things you want to do is use WP_DEBUG and find out what may be causing it.

    In every case of something like that being reported to us, it’s been due to a configuration issue, low memory, old PHP versions, or other conflicts. These can easily be diagnosed and fixed so please submit a support request at the WP-SpamShield Support Form, and we’ll get you taken care of.

    – Scott

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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