Great plugin but poorly executed

Hi bling007,

The main objective of AAM is to control access to your frontend and backend resources. Of cause this comes with an extra task that AAM performs in order to control access.

To speed up your website you can use AAM Utilities extension that can be downloaded for free.

If you are willing to reconsider your review, we more than happy to give you a complimentary AAM Plus Package ($30) license.

Thank you for your interest in AAM.
Vasyl

Okay, I shall re-consider my review. Can you forward me the Plus package so I can test it?

Hi bling007,

Sure. Send us email to [email protected] so I can send you back the license.

Regards,
Vasyl

I did so. My mail is [ link redacted, please do not post links in reviews ]

Hi bling007,

We sent you license few days ago. Does it work for you?

Regards,
Vasyl

Yes, it works fine. I am reviewing the plugin and its impact on web performance before I change my review. Please allow me some time.

I would like to mention my findings. With caching turned on and W3TC cache also installed and active, there is a slight drop in performance. Can you please verify the same with me?

Currently I have turned off AAM cache and it seems to work rather faster.

Hi bling007,

Thank you for your investigation and it is really hard to tell how W3TC impact the AAM execution. I’m going to have one available day tomorrow to work on AAM so caching is the highest priority for now.

But let me explain why it is quite challenging task and all is about access inheritance here. So WP has users that belong to certain roles and AAM allows to manage access to both. Logically if no access settings found for post A and user John, then AAM tries to inherit settings from John’s parent role. With AAM Plus Package, the third step is also to try to inherit from Default settings.

As you can see there is quite a bit of heavy lifting here. Now multiply these steps on number of posts that your website has and it can be hundreds of DB calls.

I’ve personally seen websites with few thousands of custom post types and with AAM that site was crashing.

AAM caching simply builds the giant serialized array of settings for each post, page or category and unserialize when needed. That is why this might slow down a website a bit but much less than without.

I have some ideas and will try to implement them over this weekend.

Stay tuned.
Regards,
Vasyl

Hi bling007,

New AAM release have few significant improvements to caching mechanism. Also with AAM Utilities you can Turn On/Off the AAM access control for both Frontend or Backend. Most of the time you would not need to manage access to your backend so this feature might significantly improve the performance.

At this point this is the max what we can do and hopefully you are going to follow your part of our deal and will revise your review as promised.

Appreciate your interest and help in making AAM better.
Regards,
Vasyl

Not too sure what to tell here, I updated AAM to latest version. I am trying to update my Utilities inside the AAM, it just reloads the page without updating. Maybe it might have updated it, but the update button doesn’t go, so I have no idea what on earth is going on here.

Hi bling007,

Try to FTP to your website and delete everything in wp-content/aam/extension folder. It can be either permission or some other weird filesystem issues.

Regards,
Vasyl

I tried everything you mentioned, still cannot get it to work. I deleted all those files, re-installed the utilities and plus package, they still have updates to install. This is so weird.

I like your prompt support, I am bumping my review to three only for that.