WooCommerce extremely slow after WordPress 4.2 update

I found a solution, i deactivated all the plugins and reactivated them one by one.

In our system it was the “installer” Plugin which caused this issue, once i have deactivated it, everything was fine.

Oddly enough, despite deactivating that Installer plugin last night and it making no difference, deactivating it just now fixed the slowness issue.

I run Woocommerce and I can confirm that deactivating the Installer plugin also fixed the slowness issue for my website.

Does anyone know if you use remove_meta_box for custom fields, if that stops the associated slow query without having to modify core files?

I also can confirm that deactivating the Installer pluging the website works as fast as before. Thank you

Which is this installer plugin everyone talks about?

We have the same problem but i don’t know of any installer plugin?

I don’t believe this has been fixed yet in WordPress, as a latest core update slowed everything down until we went back to the fix earlier described in this thread!

Is anybody from the WordPress core team reading this / on this thread? Has someone from Woocommerce shared this with WordPress? (now that they’re part of Automattic I would hope for more emphasis on speed optimization)

I have no idea either what this “installer” plugin is?

I also found that my backend was slow after the latest update and found out my the cron job wp_batch_split_terms in wp_options was bloated:

https://core.trac.www.ads-software.com/ticket/33423

Could be the cause of some of the problems here.

I second @cmmmc and @wordpressnewbie82 when asking what the Installer plugin is. Also, no solutions offered here work for me on a fairly busy WP/Woo site with 60 products and 3800 orders, and site is still extremely slow on the backend. Anxiously looking forward to any new developments. Thank you!

@doug Smith’s workaround doesn’t seem to be working anymore with 4.3. It was working great in 4.2!

Also the bug mentioned by @adnanoner about taxonomies doesn’t look like the culprit. I’m pretty sure it has to do with custom post fields (see Doug’s patch).

I’m using the Query Monitor plugin and it says the following query is take 12+ second:

SELECT DISTINCT meta_key
FROM wp_postmeta
WHERE meta_key NOT BETWEEN '_'
AND '_z'
HAVING meta_key NOT LIKE '\\_%'
ORDER BY meta_key
LIMIT 30

The callers are these:

meta_form()-
post_custom_meta_box()
do_meta_boxes()

Anyone solve this issue yet?

I did a deep dive into this issue and found that the issue is with the utf8mb4 encoding of the meta_key column. It you switch that encoding back to utf8 it should be a fast query again. I cannot vouch for this not causing other issues, but it is certainly worth trying for those that are having issues.

Anyone found a fix for this yet?

Woo says there’s no issues with there test (they should actually try a live site and not a demo install with 5 products and no data).

Would also be interested to know if any fixes has been found.

I’m lost on this.

I’ve disabled all plugins and changed themes and still the product admin is soooo slow.

I have 128MB of memory set in PHP, the server has 1GM of memory, the site has 316 products.

The server uses Varnish caching which I’m going to troubleshoot next but I can’t see how varnish caching would cause this issue. The site is super fast everywhere else. I’ve fined tuned my front end to be a quick as Shopify but the admin is killing us.

Next option is moving to Shopify so we can manage products quicker.