Plugin Author
Nitesh
(@nitesh_singh)
Hi @aysgarth ,
You need to understand that auction in itself needs constant check to determine when the auction is due to expire and this plugin being free does this check based on any visit on the website. And this plugin is primarily meant for websites which want to host limited number of products and have limited traffic.
Since you want to run 180 auctions, you would need a good hosting server based on the traffic of you website and you would need our PRO version which executes auction logic based on CRON Jobs and you wont face such issue. Please do note that PRO version also has a “AJAX” feature which when turned on will poll the server and would increase stress on the server. By default “AJAX” feature is off and we only recommend it to be active for websites using dedicated servers with better CPU & RAM.
Based on your usage, we would recommend you to take PRO version.
Regards,
Nitesh
Thank you for your comments. However, what I would like to know is how I can stop Ultimate Auction from polling the web site with ajax requests every time I activate the plugin. The requests will stop when I deactivate the plugin, but then restart when I next activate the plugin. This has been the situation for several weeks, so it seems the plugin is now unusable even for a small number of auctions. There must be some way to stop the polling when I do not even have any live auctions running. I do not envisage running such a large number of auctions at one time again, so I do not think the Pro version is really worthwhile for me.
Hi, so we have an auction running right now with a similar number of items that are all set to finish at the same time – and having read this the question is, is it better to leave them all to finish at the same time or to stagger the finish times say to finishing 10 at a time at maybe 20-30 minute intervals?
Hi Azure11,
We had our auctions finishing every 2 mins. It’s hard to say if increasing the time between finishes would help the situation. This is a bug in the code. You can introduce a workaround by editing the source code at wp-content/plugins/ultimate-auction/email-template.php
Simply delete lines 157, 158 and 160.
Code before editing:
if($email_sent)
{
update_post_meta( $auction_id, ‘auction_email_sent’, ‘sent’ );
}
Code after editing:
update_post_meta( $auction_id, ‘auction_email_sent’, ‘sent’ );
This will effectively remove the conditionality on marking the email as sent, so it will not retry it even if the email has failed.
If you make this fix, you will have to re-apply it after any update.
I don’t know why the author cannot fix this error. It seems strange that the recommendation for fixing a bug is to upgrade to the pro version, which more than likely contains the same bug.
It doesn’t make any difference whether emails are sent each time a page is loaded or on a cron timer. Even if a a cron timer is used it should not keep retrying for ever. There has to be a limit to the number of times that a failed email can be retried.
Thanks aysgarth, I’ll update that code nearer the end just in case there is an update. Thanks for your help.
Just to update – I changed the code. Our auction ended tonight with around 170 items. The site did go down for about 20 minutes after the auction ended but I left it, assuming that it was just going through the process of sending the emails and it came back up again after that, all fine.
Thanks to the developer of the plugin and the help with the change in code.
Thanks for the update, azure11. This will be useful, as we plan to run another auction, so I’ll know what to expect. As a matter of interest, did you space out the auction ends, or did they all take place at the exact same time? If they all ended at the same time, I can understand why the web site went down, but not if they were spaced out.
Thanks, Andrew
Hi aysgarth, I did end the big ticket items 5 minutes early just in case (only about 5 of them) then the rest went at the same time. I did intend to space them out but wasn’t able to in the end.
