[Plugin: Facebook Comments for WordPress] Performance issue – the plugin causes blog to be very slo

It should only be slow the first time it’s loaded because it’s obtaining all of the comment counts from Facebook and caching them. After that, it should be quick.

@graham,
First it is a new blog that came online – not more than 30 posts and total of 10-15 comments in the whole blog – since it’s new once.
All comments are WP comments, not any single Facebook comment.
Second, it slows down the whole blog even after it is loaded, any blog page, even the home(index) page, which does not show the facebook comment box.
It is seriously slow – just loading one post by one till the end of the page and only then the sidebar – it is really not something that can stay like this.. Meanwhile I turned off the plugin and the blog came back to a normal and good page speed loading.
I’m afraid there’s more than just obtaining and caching comments, since if there are no comments, why it affects the blog like that?

I’m having the same problem. It’s especially slow on category pages. It takes about a min to load it and it seems like caching works only for a certain time. If I load up category pages a few mins later, they load quite quickly, however if I do it a few hours later, it takes about a minute again.

It’s a great plugin, but I’m experiencing the same problem. Index and category pages load post by post. I tested load time and I receive 30 seconds or longer to load the entire page with activated plugin and 1 second with plugin deactivated. Not sure if there’s a fix, but leaving the plugin activated is not an option right now…

I experience the same problem. Just installed the plugin on https://www.voetbalstijl.nl. It loads very slow on category pages. When I disable the plugin, it runs smoothly.

Where should the plugin store the cache? I’d like to check if this really happens…

Okey, I think I solved at least a part of the problem. First of all: if the plugin slows down the page, check your settings! Make sure you have the right applicationId and applicationSecret.

But now the real pain. Sometimes I HATE PHP because it has no strong typing.

File ‘facebook-comments-functions.php’ contains a method fbComments_combineCommentCounts($value)

// Return the cached comment count (if it exists)
if (get_option("fbComments_commentCount_$xid")) {
    return fbComments_getCachedCommentCount($xid, $value);
}

The problem is it does not check for a proper NULL value. If the database contains a row with value ‘0’, if doesn’t work.

// Return the cached comment count (if it exists)
if (get_option("fbComments_commentCount_$xid") !== null) {
    return fbComments_getCachedCommentCount($xid, $value);
}

This at least solves a part of the problem. Loading a single post is now a lot faster, but the overview pages are still a little bit slow…

@jorgenhorstink, in my case I did wrote the right appID and secretID in the plugin’s options.

I will check your suggestion and see if it helps.

Anyway, if this solves only slowness on single posts and index and archives are still slow, it won’t be enough for re-activating the plugin.
I really hope that the plugin’s developer Graham Swan will release a fix version for this, as this is a very useful and important plugin.

Hey guys,
I believe I found the solution ??

On plugin options page, under Application Settings, deselect “Combine WordPress and Facebook comment counts”.

Makes sense since every post in the loop calls for a count.

It worked for me. Index and category pages load lightning fast while Facebook comments are enabled!

Let me know if it helped you.

brs: but if your page has no facebook comments, it still sends a request to facebook and that’s what causes the lag. Did you also test this on a new post without facebook comments?

@jorgenhorstink, yes the same goes for a new post with no FB comments yet. I wouldn’t know why this speeds up things, I just played with the options and tested the performance. However, I must note that in this case WP comments are hidden. Not sure what happens if you combine WP comments with FB comments.

I think that the idea of counting facebook comments as part of the WO comments of a post is a bad idea in meaning of performance, I don’t think there’s a real good way to deal with it. I think that this option could be turned off and it could solve all performance issue.
What do you think?

Meanwhile, I’ve seen this post about Facebook released its updated Comments plugin this week, which includes a robust set of new features.
https://mrinternettips.com/install-facebooks-new-comments-on-your-wordpress-website-or-blog/

Unfortunately, you can’t make the comments load faster from facebook. However, you can make it load after with the “simple facebook comments” plugin. It uses asynchronous facebook connection. This means once your page loads it will start to connect to facebook consecutively. This will improve you page speed seo wise.