Why does slider stop after a while?

I reported this 3 months ago here –

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/background-slideshow-seems-to-stop-at-random-after-some-time

Any update? I’ve seen the slideshow stop in just a few minutes sometimes. Using full screen slideshow, random images changing every 60 seconds (even tried every 10 seconds), transition time about 5 seconds.

This can happen under the following circumstances:

– You are using a caching plugin, such as W3C, which does not have garbage collection enabled (or does so at period longer than 12 hours)
– The web server is too slow responding to an AJAX request (it must reply within 5 seconds).
– The AJAX response was malformed (ie., incomplete result, another plugin modified the response, etc).

The plugin is designed to stop on severely delayed responses, to prevent it from hammering a web server that is experiencing a heavy loads.

It seems that the plugin is hitting the server with ajax requests contantly while sitting on the same web page. If so, is that necessary? Can’t the images be put in a hidden div of images so that they are cached by the browser on the local pc? I’ve since switched to another plugin because I don’t want my web server to be constantly hit while someone is just sitting on a web page with the slider enabled. I may revisit your plugin depending on your reply. Thanks again for all your efforts!

Hey @Myatu, that was quick. ??

Regarding W3C. I have garbage collection set to 24 hours, your 12 hour period is too short in my opinion. I was considering going longer garbage collection intervals like a say 7 days, simply because thats about the average frequency of updates on my site.

Would you consider making BGM work with Garbage Collection intervals?

Would you also consider waiting Longer for the webserver to respond like at least 10-15 seconds? My problem is that the main content of my site is Media and I have large quality images being served, not just through BGM but through other plugins also. I think the 5 second wait is too short to deal with sites like mine. Rather than time out so fast, can you can reduce the freqency of requests you make to get the next image for the slide but continue trying for a longer period of time, this would really help out sites like mine from stopping the slideshow.

@mharpen – The reason for using AJAX rather than embedding the data, is to keep the page sizes close to their original. In other words, it avoids adding bloat. This also allows BGM to have a Image Sets that are not bound to limits. Those were issues/limitation by other, similar plugins that I wanted to avoid. Version 2 will be taking a very different approach to this, and will certainly improve the performance for both client- and serve side.

@janubande007 – The problem with having garbage collection set for too long, is that it interferes with WordPress’ AJAX authentication functions. A nonce is only valid for a 12 hour period, between 0am [midnight] to 12pm, and between 12pm and 0am. You can override this in WordPress itself (its not a BGM function/feature). BGM uses these authentication functions to ensure AJAX requests and responses are not tampered with (for example, tell it to display a rude image).

Thank you Myatu! Yes, if there’s any way you can use the browser’s cache (maybe if there’s fewer than 5 images or give us an option not to use the ajax requests). I know that’s easier said than done. Thanks again!

Hey @Myatu,

Garbage collection is not a major issue (at least for me) but you didn’t say anything about longer timeout period. I’m loading 1 background image every 60 seconds, so for a setup like mine, I have no problem if BGM hit my server every second for 5 seconds, then hit every 2 seconds for the next 10 seconds and then hit every 5 seconds for the next 30 seconds before timing out but then when its time for the next slide, it should repeat again.

If you keep the timeout short that can work too so long as it restarts trying to get the next image after the slideshow interval is over – this way you for setups like mine with longer intervals, there’s not stoppage nor will there be overload of hits if thats your concern.

Would you consider making the following options configurable to deal with this more flexibly:
RetryFrequency – number of times to hit server per second
SlideTimeout – timeout for each slide, 0 would mean none
SlideshowTimeout – timeout for the slideshow, 0 would mean none
SlideshowPlaytime – timeout after with slideshow will stop at last image, 0 would mean infinite

The issue is when you look at it from a point of a single user. Then a request every second won’t be harmful. But if you have 10,000+ visitors every hour, this will become a huge issue. I’ll see what I can do in the meantime, but this will be overhauled completely eventually.

Hello @Myatu, I was not looking at it from a single user, I just didn’t wanna get too much into depth there and distract the subject matter.

I understand your point of view of scalability for super busy sites. If you think deep about the options I suggested in my previous post, you might be able to ship BGM with some defaults for them that can scale up very well while still being flexible enough for many of us like me to customize and change them.

Thanks.