HEAVY Loading

Not sure why this plugin would be any more responsible for memory consumption than core WordPress — there isn’t anything happening in the plugin that WordPress doesn’t do normally. I guess if you had a large amount of books stored in the database, but that would have less to do with the plugin than it would the amount of data you are querying.

Memory consumption is not necessarily a symptom of a problem. Obviously if you don’t have any data, and you aren’t doing anything with any plugins, your memory consumption will be low. And once you start adding data, and run queries that manipulate and pull up that data, obviously your memory consumption is going to be higher. Memory is there to be used — that’s the purpose of memory. So having a lot of stuff in memory is not necessarily a problem. Computers, servers should be able to purge their own memory when it becomes a problem — if data gets stuck in memory, and is unable to be purged, that is a problem, as it is indicative of a memory leak, but that is (generally) a server-side issue.

I’m just not sure what problem you need solved here, and there’s very little environmental information that you’ve shared which would elaborate on your specific issue. You haven’t even explicitly said your server runs slow while running the plugin and nothing else. If the server runs fine, then the memory usage should not be an issue. In fact, in my experience as a freelancer and a professional WordPress developer, I have seen very few issues that were caused by high memory consumption — usually if that is the actual cause of a problem, you’ll start to see 500 errors or PHP timeouts as the server is unable to respond to the request.

Hi Chris,
As I have wrote on the title the website has a heavy loading time, with out the plugin 1,5-2 seconds and with the plugin the loading time goes up to 2 minutes.
And the second issue is the extreme memory consumption when the plugin is activate.

As for data into the plugin their are more than 100 books with full input.
The plugin was not install yesterday, but more than a year ago.

Here is a report from P3
I profiled my WordPress site’s performance using the Profile Plugin and I wanted
to share the results with you. Please take a look at the information below:

WordPress Plugin Profile Report
===========================================
Report date: January 22, 2016
Theme name: Rebound
Pages browsed: 18
Avg. load time: 95.8619 sec
Number of plugins: 18
Plugin impact: 19.56% of load time
Avg. plugin time: 95.8619 sec
Avg. core time: 0.1109 sec
Avg. theme time: 0.1411 sec
Avg. mem usage: 308.07 MB
Avg. ticks: 66,910
Avg. db queries : 10941.44
Margin of error : 0.0521 sec

Plugin list:
===========================================
P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) – 0.0024 sec – 0.01%
iThemes Security – 0.0570 sec – 0.16%
Book Review Library – 0.0238 sec – 0.07%
CloudFlare – 0.0019 sec – 0.01%
Contact Form 7 – 0.0326 sec – 0.09%
Events Maker – 0.0947 sec – 0.26%
Google Analytics – 0.0008 sec – 0.00%
Greeklish Permalink – 0.7354 sec – 2.05%
Heartbeat Control – 0.0077 sec – 0.02%
Iwp Client – 0.0159 sec – 0.04%
Jw Player Plugin For WordPress – 0.0076 sec – 0.02%
MailChimp – 0.0073 sec – 0.02%
Nice Paypal Button Lite – 0.0005 sec – 0.00%
Responsive Video Light – 0.0090 sec – 0.03%
Simple Custom Post Order – 5.7447 sec – 16.02%
Wordpress Seo – 0.2909 sec – 0.81%
Empty – 0.0004 sec – 0.00%

I notice several data here as you can see:
1. Loading time: ~96 secs
2. Core time: 0.1109 sec
3. Avg. mem usage: 308.07 MB
4. Book Review Library – 0.0238 sec – 0.07%

Even with the LOW loading time of the plugin from P3 it is the ONLY plugin that cause this.

I have remove ALL the other plugins & also test it with Sixteen theme and got same issue at frontend & backend
Even with the WPML installed & enabled I dont see so heavy loading.

Of course I have seen execution time outs and 500, but because I have dedicated I am able to change the settings and I remove the executions time out and the 500 cause of drain the memory of the vps.
The site runs on PHP 5.4.45 @64BitOS with WP version 4.4.1

If you need more info please let me know.

Hi Nick —

I apologize, but I’m still having a hard time seeing the correlation.

You’re telling me that you’ve had the plugin for more than a year with 100+ books. That means that you’ve either been experiencing this issue the entire time or there’s something else going on. In the last year, there have only been 3 updates to the plugin. One of them was a compatibility update for WordPress 4.3 widgets, the others were all very minor bugfixes. Which is to say, nothing significant has changed in the plugin the entire time you’ve been using it, certainly not in the last few days which is when you have said you started experiencing the issue.

From the P3 profiler data you’ve shared I see high loading time and average memory usage of 300+ MB. I also see that Book Review Library is one of the smallest contributors to load time (0.02 seconds, less than WordPress core, less than WordPress SEO, less than Contact Form 7, etc) making it one of the smallest contributors to page load time (0.07%).

Based on the data you’ve provided, I would look at the Simple Custom Post Order plugin which is taking almost 6 seconds to load and the Greeklish Permalink plugin which is taking almost a full second.

I understand that there is an issue and I can even empathize that the issue only exists when Book Review Library is active. However, the data you are giving me is not reflecting that problem. Rather than telling me that Book Review Library is the leading cause of your excessive page load time, it is telling me it’s one of the least likely factors in your page load time.

As I said before, high memory usage is not necessarily a problem. In my experience, 300MB memory usage is fairly average, and even low, for a site with a lot of data and a lot of plugins. It does not necessarily mean there’s a problem unless your VPS is set up to only allow 256MB-300MB of RAM — then it would be a problem (because you would be using more physical memory than your server instance was configured to allow). All the WordPress VPSs I’ve ever run were set up with a minimum of 500MB RAM, so 308MB should not be a problem and the P3 data you’ve shown here does not support the issue you’ve reported that Book Review Library is responsible for heavy load.

Have you checked your server error logs? You haven’t shared your P3 data with no plugins active, are the load times the same? Are they the same with a different theme? What might have changed in the last week that could have led to this issue since, from what I’m hearing, it seems like this is a recent phenomenon? Have you rebooted your VPS? Have you tried optimizing your database tables? Have you tried temporarily turning off the Cloudflare DNS service for your site?

I did some testing of my own with the P3 Profiler plugin.

When I ran the profiler without the Book Review plugin installed (a few other plugins installed but just using demo content from wptest.io) my memory usage was 3.97MB

I installed Book Review Library, enabled all the features, created a test book review filling out all the fields, then created a new page with the following shortcode:

[book-reviews covers=true format=excerpt]

The memory usage after doing this was 4.33MB which is only a 9% increase or < 1 MB. This would obviously scale differently with more data.

Since I can’t test the plugin with your specific theme (which is a ThemeForest theme), I ran the theme demo through a webpage speed test. Here is the result: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/160125_F9_VFH/

The big point over there is the initial load time and the repeat view. Initial load time is > 6 seconds. On a repeat view, it’s still 2.5 seconds.

That’s a lot. Let’s compare it against wordpress.com: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/160125_X2_VJ3/
1.5 seconds on first load, .5 seconds on repeat view.

Okay, but that’s a highly optimized site, let’s look at something a little more realistic. www.ads-software.com: https://www.webpagetest.org/result/160125_A9_VQW/
4 seconds on first load, 2 seconds for repeat viewing.

Not trying to simply shrug off the blame or point fingers elsewhere, I’m just not seeing the issue and if I can’t reproduce it, I can’t fix it.

Do you want to send you a snap from “duplicator” ?
So you can install it as it is and check it out.

I am not familiar with that so I cannot answer that question. I’m not sure that I would be willing to do that anyway because you haven’t adequately shown me that the issue is with the plugin and not something else. As pointed out earlier, there are a wide variety of things that could be causing your issue that have nothing to do with the plugin. The data you have shared proves that the Book Review Library is not a leading contributor to page load time (responsible for only 0.07% of the load and adding only 0.0238 seconds). I am not willing to discuss memory consumption because as previously stated, high memory usage is not a problem (while this seems counter-intuitive from a Windows standpoint, on *nix servers, this is absolutely true. This site explains it fairly well: https://www.linuxatemyram.com/).

If you look at it from my perspective, focussing only on page load times, your theme is responsible for 2.5 – 6 seconds of load time, depending on whether there are cached images, CSS and js files. By your own data, the Simple Custom Post Order plugin is responsible for another 5 seconds and 16% of the page load. And that’s testing the theme from the demo site — which uses optimized data with no other plugins. I can guarantee you that all of those images have been explicitly optimized for the web and that there aren’t additional javascript files or third party libraries being added by additional plugins. Images — particularly large images — can add anywhere from 1 – 5 seconds or more depending on their size. If you have a page full of them, multiply that 5 seconds by the number of images on the page. Additional javascript files, font files and CSS can add to page load as well. You can get a detailed breakdown on what sources are causing your page load speeds at https://webpagetest.org. The “time to first byte” is the server itself processing the data requested and everything that follows that are assets on the page.

There’s not even a guarantee that this plugin (or any other WordPress plugin) should work on your environment. The GPL license under which this, and all other plugins and themes in the www.ads-software.com repository are released, is explicit on this point.

THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.

Everything in the www.ads-software.com repositories are produced by people who are volunteering their code, services, etc. without getting anything in return. While some plugins in the www.ads-software.com repository have a “premium” version, or use the plugin as a means to offer other developer or support services, Book Review Library is not one of them. If the plugin suddenly stops working for you or is not providing you with the value you had hoped from it, you can simply turn it off or find something else that works better.

While a database dump might provide me with verifiable data that I would need to prove that this plugin — more than any other plugin or theme that you are running — is explicitly responsible for your page load issue, it might not. It might just prove my point further. But I have a full-time job for a WordPress development agency, we have mirrored environments for all of our clients to ensure that the data that we are working with locally during development matches the public production or development servers. We also charge upwards of $200/hour or more when we are building a site. If I was to set up a local environment to test against or mirror your environment, I would be volunteering to do that for free. As much as I like building WordPress things, I’m not willing to do that.

The last thing I would like to point out is that if you look at the plugin information for this plugin, it says 1000+ active installs. That means there are more than 1000 sites that are running this plugin. This is the first time anyone has ever said that it contributes to high page load time. This, along with everything else I’ve said, reinforces my feeling that there isn’t adequate information correlating this plugin to your issue. Again, if the plugin is no longer working for you, you are under no obligation to continue using it.

If you would like to use this space to brainstorm other ideas about what could be causing the problem, I’m more than happy to continue an open and honest dialog. However, if you are still of the opinion that Book Review Library is solely responsible for your high page load times, I have to say that I respectfully disagree.