wordpress admin: failed trying to send a request to the Font Awesome API server

wow – so many responses & I missed them all :-/

The plugin has been fine for months. I can’t swear when it stopped working, but no more than a few days ago… the error is very apparent on any admin page.

I raised it with the hosting provider first but after they investigated they were fairly confident the problem was with the plugin or the api server.

I don’t have shell access to the server unfortunately.

performance
I thought this unrelated, but seeing @brianoakes comments, I should note that I found the site dreadfully slow today. There was an unusual 5s delay on every page load (just downloading the page without images or scripts). The reason I missed the messages was that I was investigating this.

The delay went away — but on reflection this was probably about the time I deinstalled/reinstalled the plugin. And when I reinstalled, I couldn’t activate it because of “fatal error: Font Awesome could not be activated.”.

So effectively, like brianoakes, our performance recovered after disabling the plugin.

Update: I initially reported that the API server seemed to be working fine, but that was a very basic test that just confirmed that it was up and responding. After doing some additional experimentation, I can see that it’s responding slowly and intermittently. Server performance logs do reflect that something significant changed recently. We’re investigating this now.

The plugin does not query the Font Awesome API server on each WordPress (front end) page load, however it does query the Font Awesome API server each time you load the Font Awesome settings page in WordPress admin.

I’m curious to know whether the 5 second delay was only happening when you load the admin page, or if it was occurring on any front end page load (i.e. non-admin) on your WordPress site.

@mlwilkerson the delay was happening in both admin and front end. My site runs pretty fast with WP Rocket and it was taking forever for front end pages to load, my web host even noticed the same thing. As soon as I disabled the plug-in it was back to regular fast speed.

Update: we’ve found some system failures on the API server that have been leading to strange behavior, including slow and failed responses.

We’ve posted an outage status on our status page here.

We’re actively working to resolve it.

@brianoakes @paucompany @wwwcre8r @darrylschmidt
There’s a link in the sidebar “Subscribe” that you can use to get email updates when new comments are added in a topic. (Note that on mobile and other narrow screens the “sidebar” may be located below the main page content.)

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• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by tobifjellner (Tor-Bjorn “Tobi” Fjellner). Reason: Missed a closing parenthesis

No to be disrespectful, but your comment is a little condescending. My comments were NOT just for “me too”. My comments provided tangible and additional information that the OP originally had. ie; I went through a bunch of steps with my web host server, documented them, followed up with the suggestions the plugin author suggested and then provided the results so that the plugin author could better investigate. Instead of scolding me like a child, you should encourage others who have similar issues who provide additional context and be thankful.

You suggest opening a new topic, but wouldn’t that be more laborious and annoying to the plugin author and any other users who may be facing a similar issue to have to sift through additional posts?

Since my comments seem to require moderation, I doubt you’ll approve this, but your response was a bit condescending.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by brianoakes.

Not just admin and frontend. Even directly accessing the page was slow

e.g. for a 130k page:

time wget https://www.timelessallure.co.uk/treatments/facial-in-a-box/
…
real 0m7.006s

But without the plugin, sub-second response.

@tobifjellner in fact had i NOT commented, the plug in author would have likely thought it was just a one off user issue as his original comments indicated there was nothing wrong with his module, which we now know is not the case, so again. you should be thanking me for providing additional information which helped the plugin module author realize he had a larger issue than just one user, instead of condescending “don’t post me too posts” but again.. i doubt youll approve this response

OK, we’ve made some performance optimizations in the API server that seem to have resolved the immediate performance issues, and we’ll be taking another look at more long-term solutions.

However, based on the feedback I’m hearing on this thread, it sounds like one contributing factor to the problem is that there was a sudden spike in requests to the API server.

It should not be the case that your WordPress server causes a request to to be sent to the Font Awesome API server on each page load. The plugin is specifically designed to *avoid* that by caching those query results in a transient in the WordPress database. I’ve verified that the current version of the plugin–when used all by itself under standard conditions–*doesn’t* do that.

Yet the fact that @cdcooperuk was seeing such slow page responses due apparently to querying the Font Awesome API server on each page load suggests that something is causing those API requests to occur on all page loads. That makes me wonder if you have another plugin or theme that is using this plugin’s API in an unintended way. It’s possible that some other code is calling FontAwesome::refresh_releases() on all page loads, which definitely should be avoided.

If there is a theme or plugin that’s using the FontAwesome PHP API on your web server, it should have registered itself with this plugin, and you would then see it listed on the Font Awesome settings page on the Troubleshoot tab. For any of you who experienced this issue, do you see any other registered clients listed there on the Troubleshoot tab?

thanks @mlwilkerson appreciate it. I do use Elementor Pro which i believe does use FontAwesome as well, but I disabled the FA plugin earlier today as I couldn’t even access the troubleshoot tab, in fact I deleted the plugin completely as I found a solution to resole my issue that involved putting a direct path to the FA API in my <head>.

I was only using the FA plugin, because for some odd reason on iOS devices certain fonts the theme that I bought didn’t display, specifically in the cart and checkout and your plugin resolved it. But placing the direct path in my <head> also resolved it so no need to run the plugin any more.

perhaps some of the other users can check.

What my host server told me RE: the spike in php children at the same time as I noticed this issue is that it spiked because the plugin kept trying to call the API and as a result it just hung up there repeatedly trying to access it, which spiked my php children resources to about 25 when i typically use about 2 average.

again thank you

I can confirm that with your fix I’ve been able to activate the plugin again. (thanks)

It shows

Registered themes or plugins
No active themes or plugins have requested preferences for Font Awesome.

Other themes or plugins
We haven’t detected any plugins or themes trying to load Font Awesome.

Thanks @brianoakes and @cdcooperuk. Really sorry for the trouble this caused you. Working hard over here to build stable systems that you’ll find fast and reliable.

So, I know you might be exhausted from this one for now, but I’d like the opportunity to investigate a little further if you’re willing to allow me.

If so, would you email Font Awesome support and ask for me (Mike) at hello at fontawesome dot com?

Hi:

Dear friend, I confirm that the problem has been resolved. In relation to the slowdown of the Web when it was not able to load the Fontawesone API, it was because, when it failed, it was continuously sending requests. Once the problem is solved, my website works at full speed. Thank you very much for such a quick solution. Sincerely:

Pau Company