Beware page load effects

Form Maker was good enough for forms, though we ultimately moved on to Airtable. My big caution for anyone who’s considering it is a potential page load bug.

We traced the slowdown to Form Maker’s cookie-tracking code. The plugin was making database requests on ordinary page views, including attempts to update empty cookie records. Its database design lacked an index on the field used to find those records, and it also performed cookie-table cleanup during normal processing. It wasn’t unusual for it to cause pages to need 45 seconds to load — and these were pages without forms. We deactivated the plugin, and page generation dropped from 45 seconds to less than half a second.