Counters and W3 Total Cache

Resolved Marcelo Pedra
(@kent-brockman)

9 years, 8 months ago

Hello sirs. I’m noticing since two or three version upgrades in Shareaholic, the sites with heavy traffic (5000+ daily), showing social network counters in the posts are performing LOTS of requests to admin-ajax.php (admin-ajax.php?action=shareaholic_share_counts_ap…) for each and every visitor hitting every page. This impacts negatively on the server. Even if the site is using W3 Total Cache to create HTML cache of the pages + CDN to allocate images. The admin-ajax.php requests are generating a lot of queries.

Question #1: is Shareaholic querying admin-ajax for one and every of the counters in a given page? or does it cache that entire page set of counters? Let’s say: if I use to show the counters for Fcbk, Tw, G+, LnkdIn, before the post AND after the post, will Shareaholic cache ONE string with the counters for that given post? or will it store an individual cache value for every social network FOR that given post?

Quesiton #2: do you recommend any special cache configuration to take into consideration with W3 Total Cache? You know it has a lot of options and if the cached values may be cached in SOME way, i.e., by caching any individual js file, I will be more than willing to configure it.

Question #3: where are the social counters cache being stored for quick access? In my DB or in the Shareaholic cloud? This question is in regards of in-post social counters AND floating counters. What would you recommend? using one or another to improve cache and download times?

I have a small news site. That’s why I need to lower the requests to the server to a minimum. Last week I had to turn off the social counters for the post in the homepage due to the excessive admin-ajax queries… But the server still have a heavy work when viewing any post. I just need to optimize Shareaholic usage to the max.

Hope to hear soon from you.
Best regards.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/shareaholic/

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)

Thread Starter Marcelo Pedra
(@kent-brockman)

9 years, 8 months ago

No news yet? My hosting provider is almost yelling at me because of this. The problem arise when you have a very huge website, with tons of posts and tags, and 15-25 users constantly online.

Shareaholic should cache counter info in disk, not in the DB.

Hope to hear soon from you.

devinemily_shareaholic
(@devinemily_shareaholic)

9 years, 8 months ago

Hi Marcelo – My apologies for missing your original post! Below are answers to your questions:

If you have share counts enabled, we make a request to each social network api to get the share count. So the number of requests depends on the number of buttons you have.

We do not cache share counts, so indeed we’ll need to make the request each time someone visits the page. This also ensures up-to-date share counts are showing.

However, we do make separate request for each set of buttons on the page, because each is it’s own “app.” We’re looking into ways to optimize this, so our apps are as speedy and efficient as possible! In the meantime, in your case, using the Floating Share buttons would take care of all pages with just one set of buttons.

I hope this helps, but feel free to send along additional questions. You can also email me: devin@shareaholic.com.

🙂 Devin

Plugin Author Shareaholic
(@shareaholic)

9 years, 8 months ago

@marcelo we’re working on a better way to cache share counts. We’re currently using the Transients API – http://codex.wordpress.org/Transients_API to cache share counts (requested by the server side API) for up to 5 minutes. For the quickest fix, we recommend turning off “server side share counts” from under Advanced Settings. This will stop your database from filling up and you’re still get most of your share counters anyways.

Question #1: is Shareaholic querying admin-ajax for one and every of the counters in a given page? or does it cache that entire page set of counters? Let’s say: if I use to show the counters for Fcbk, Tw, G+, LnkdIn, before the post AND after the post, will Shareaholic cache ONE string with the counters for that given post? or will it store an individual cache value for every social network FOR that given post?

If you’re using server side share counts, we cache the results of admin-ajax call for up to 5 minutes on the server and 3 minutes on the client. Shareaholic will cache ONE string if the sharing services are the same and in the same sequence. We are going to be optimizing this.

If you’re not using server side share counts, you will still see (most) share counters and all the requests will be made client side putting no pressure on your DB.

Question #3: where are the social counters cache being stored for quick access? In my DB or in the Shareaholic cloud? This question is in regards of in-post social counters AND floating counters. What would you recommend? using one or another to improve cache and download times?

In your DB *IF* you’re using the server side share counts feature. Floated and in-post should perform similarly. The advantage of Floated, as @devinemily_shareaholic mentions is that you won’t need multiple sets of share buttons on the same page, reducing load.

Thread Starter Marcelo Pedra
(@kent-brockman)

9 years, 8 months ago

ok, thanks for the clarifications.

Let’s see if I understood well: if I ONLY USE floating social counters, it shouldn’t use my database? It will be stored in the client’s PC?

Because I’m now using only the floating icons and the requests to admin-ajax.php are still taking place.

Plugin Author Shareaholic
(@shareaholic)

9 years, 8 months ago

@marcelo

To turn off requests to admin-ajax, simply turn off “server side share counts” under “Advanced Settings”.

If you would like to keep “server side share counts” ON and only have floated share buttons turns on, it will significantly reduce the # of requests to admin-ajax.php when compared to having 3 sets of share buttons on the same page.

Thread Starter Marcelo Pedra
(@kent-brockman)

9 years, 8 months ago

Wow! That made a difference!

When I first switched from classic counter icons above/below posts to the floating counters, the overall server load went down from about 6 to 3.

Now I turned off “server side share counts” and the Apache queries downsized so much that server load is now reduced to 2.2

The pages are loading more rapidly now, and even the counters in the social icons are appearing quicker than before.

Now, the next big thing to optimize is the Custom CSS module by JetPack which is really the other heavy weighting thing that could and should be cached rather than load dynamically.

I will use this experience today to optimize all my sites. Big thanks!

Plugin Author Shareaholic
(@shareaholic)

9 years, 8 months ago

You’re welcome! 🙂 I’m glad it worked out.

Thread Starter Marcelo Pedra
(@kent-brockman)

9 years, 8 months ago

BTW, is there any way to prevent showing the floating social counters in specific pages? (i.e., contact forms, sitemaps, logged in & private pages…)

You should add an option to the Shareaholic options in every editor screen and simply trigger to not load the remote counters if that page specify it so.
Consider it a feature request 🙂

devinemily_shareaholic
(@devinemily_shareaholic)

9 years, 8 months ago

Hi Marcelo!

We do offer a manual way to do this:

http://support.shareaholic.com/hc/en-us/articles/203398957-How-to-enable-or-disable-Floated-Share-Buttons-on-a-specific-page

It does not exist in settings right now, but we’re considering building this in the future!

Thread Starter Marcelo Pedra
(@kent-brockman)

9 years, 8 months ago

oh dear, yes, please, add the setting to the Shareaholic box in the editor screens. Since it’s just an on/off setting it cannot be difficult to code, just a mere if..then sentence :).

Adding your abovementioned piece of javascript to specific pages will work surely but it poses a maintanance nightmare. I need another plugin, like CJT which allow to add pieces of code to specific pages, which only means an extra plugin to keep up with and configure in several websites.

Please, I’m sure other Shareaholic fans will benefit if you add this feature.

Thread Starter Marcelo Pedra
(@kent-brockman)

9 years, 8 months ago

oh and btw, where is actually being loaded the shareaholic code? Since installing this code in WordPress for specific pages will be done via plugin, I need to know where to put the code? header? footer? at very beginning of what of those calls?

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)

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