Causes admin edit screens to load extremely slowly

Hello!

This is the first time we get such a report. Nevertheless, since I’m amidst optimizing all JS files of TSF, I’m gravitating towards an issue where the social image preview icon tries to preemptively load a huge image your internet/device doesn’t handle well.

Does this issue occur on every page that you try to edit? And, does this issue also happen on the SEO Settings page?

Hi… thanks for the quick response.

I do think this has something to do with Advanced Custom Fields (Pro)… it’s only an issue on pages that have a large number of ACF’s Flexible Content fields. The SEO Settings page loads fine, and general content editing screens load fine when they don’t have a lot of Flexible Content fields on them.

Problem is… I do depend a lot on ACF and the Flexible Content fields… no way that I can get rid of them. And the slow loading on those editing screens only happens when SEO Framework is active.

Hello again!

Ah, that rings a bell! We did have a similar report four years ago, which you can find here: https://github.com/sybrew/the-seo-framework/issues/18.

I’m probably one that hates performance hogs the most around here–so, together with the user (Lukas), we went down a whole rabbit hole looking for plausible causes… alas, to no avail. I also spoke with the developers of ACF back then, but we were unable to replicate the issue and identify the cause.

You may try your luck by disabling TSF’s SEO Bar (General > Layout). But the root of this quirk is still a mystery to us. You may find some more luck highlighting this issue with the authors of ACF, might they’ve acquired newfound knowledge related to this issue since we last convened.

Unfortunately, I do not have access to their (updated) commercial software. So, I’m afraid I can’t help you further from here.

Thanks! I will give this a try and see if it helps. I really do prefer your plugin over (that other one) so I’m hopeful I can get this resolved.

One other thing to note —?it does seem to be more of a problem on my development/staging server than on my live server. Both are with Digital Ocean. I’m never seeing any of the resources (CPU/RAM) getting maxed out, but the dev server only has 2 vCPUs and the live server has 6. I wonder if that is making a difference.

Hi @room34

I just crawled through the memory and CPU utilization with TSF and ACF Pro active, after I populated nested flexible fields–alas, to no avail; I could not find signs of plausible excessive memory or CPU usage in the debugging records.

Could you help me out debugging? I need two things.

First, the custom fields:

1. Go to Custom Fields > Tools
2. Select “Toggle All”
3. Export File

Second, the posts:

1. Go to Tools > Export
2. Select “Posts” (or Pages, whichever is affected), leave everything else default.
3. Download Export File

Then, please pack them in a ZIP archive locally and send them to me, confidentially. You can do that via our contact page: https://tsf.fyi/contact.

If you have any more details that could be useful to share, like the WordPress, ACF, and PHP version numbers, and any active plugins, please forward those too ??

I’ll then try to mimic your situation on a local VM, and see if the perfect storm gives more useful data.

Thank you!

I just wanted to follow up on this… I still have not been able to pick this all apart to figure out the issue, but I thought you’d like to know, the situation has reversed itself. Now I am finding that Yoast SEO is the plugin that is causing severe issues in conjunction with ACF Flexible Content. An editing screen that takes 4 seconds to load with Yoast off takes 17 when it’s turned on! But with The SEO Framework instead, it only takes 5 seconds.

So now I am in the process of switching my client sites with the most complex ACF page layouts from Yoast back over to SEO Framework!

• This reply was modified 4 years, 5 months ago by room34.

Hello again!

I forgot to follow up with you on this matter.

Thanks to this very helpful JavaScript developer, we’ve been able to deduct the cause of the issue: jQuery can cause a memory leak.

I’m not sure whether ACF or jQuery is at fault here (I’ve informed Elliot, author of ACF), but long story short: in TSF v4.1.1 I’ve exchanged over 300 jQuery calls for vanilla Javascript ones.

With that, TSF and ACF Pro’s “Flexible Content Fields” will no longer cause your dashboard to lag. However, another plugin that works with jQuery may still cause this issue on your site.

I still think 4~5 seconds is on the slow side, but it’s far better than 17~27 ?? You may want to see if turning on OpCode caching helps (it will!) — contact your hosting partner for instructions.

I hope the transition from Yoast to TSF goes well. If you’re encountering issues, please open a new topic. Thank you!

Thanks, this is very helpful… my implementation of ACF is also relying on a cloned settings tab. Sounds like a very similar setup. I have already stretched this implementation of ACF Flexible Content fields to the limit, so maybe taking the time to break up those cloned fields into their own separate copies might be worth the effort. I’ll investigate further.

In the meantime, it’s also helpful for me, with my lazy inclination to rely on jQuery a lot these days, to see how inefficient it can be compared to plain JavaScript. I may look into extracting myself from its clutches. ??

Hello again!

Instead of going out of your way, you may want to try the latest jQuery version supported by WordPress. You can use it via this (development!) plugin: https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-jquery-update-test/.

Not all plugins and themes are updated to support the latest version of jQuery, though. So, you may find some administrative pages not working correctly anymore with the jQuery tester plugin enabled. But, it’s quite likely they do work, so it’s worth a shot!

Thanks, I will give that a try!