Fatal Conflict with WP E-Commerce

Jason T. Wiser
(@webinator)

11 years, 4 months ago

I had an insane amount of entries to my wp-options table, like 100+ per minute. After much research and paid dev support, here is what I was told from the WP E-Commerce Development team:

When you use Awesome Flickr Gallery, it will output URLs like this on your pages to link to galleries and pages:

http://mysite.org/author/my-site/?afg4_page_id=4

The URL above will presumably display Awesome Flickr Gallery ID 4, page 4.

It becomes even more confusing when you have multiple Awesome Flickr Gallery in one page, which will leave you with URLs such as this:

http://mysite.org/author/my-site/feed/?afg4_page_id=4&afg5_page_id=1&afg6_page_id=2&afg3_page_id=4&afg10_page_id=1&afg11_page_id=3

When Google crawls your site, they see those links, and they assume these are all different pages due to the difference in URL, even though they’re just the same page, with just different flickr galleries:

http://mysite.org/author/my-site/
http://mysite.org/author/my-site/?afg4_page_id=4
http://mysite.org/author/my-site/?afg4_page_id=5
http://mysite.org/author/my-site/?afg5_page_id=1&afg4_page_id=5

Google Bots also crawls your feed, as a result, they’ll also crawl these pages periodically to detect updates:

http://mysite.org/author/my-site/feed
http://mysite.org/author/my-site/feed/?afg4_page_id=4
http://mysite.org/author/my-site/feed/?afg4_page_id=5
http://mysite.org/author/my-site/feed/?afg5_page_id=1&afg4_page_id=5

Over time, the URLs generated by Awesome Flickr Gallery accumulate (all the possible permutations of the number of galleries you have, and the number of pages each gallery has, imagine how big that is), and Google Bot perpetually crawls these feeds every 4 seconds.

This all results in flooding your database.

However, please understand that this is mainly an issue related to Google robots.txt file!

– Open your robots.txt file, and make sure you’re using the robots.txt file that WordPress.org recommends:
codex.wordpress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_WordPress#Robots.txt_Optimization

You can see that this line: Disallow: */feed/ disallows Google Bots from indexing feeds.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/awesome-flickr-gallery-plugin/

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

Thread Starter Jason T. Wiser
(@webinator)

11 years, 4 months ago

I meant to mention some keywords for others to find this solution. This is the solution for too many wp-options and transient data causing conflict between _transient_wpsc_customer_meta and _transient_timeout_wpsc_customer_meta and _transient_timeout_afg_id and _transient_afg_id

fix robot.txt feed

Thread Starter Jason T. Wiser
(@webinator)

10 years, 12 months ago

[Update] This turns out to NOT be the solution to the question “too many transient entries in the wp_options” table.

The real answer is that WP E-Commerce adds a transient entry every time someone visits the site, robot or human. So I discovered that my site was under attack from rogue bots, and they were hitting me 3 times a second for 1000’s of hits to my site.

every hit triggered a transient entry.

The real fix for this is to install some sort of protection from bot attacks like Install Login Security Solution plugin.

you can also run a script from your PhpMyadmin to clear all your transient files before you backup. something like

DELETE FROM wp_options WHERE option_name LIKE '_transient%'

Here is a quote from the WP E-Commerce Development team from a Gold Support ticket. they wrote

WP e-Commerce creates a customer record for every visit. This strategy is, admittedly, not optimal, but it works on the vast majority of shops. We didn’t take into consideration bots as a major factor here. Currently we’re having discussions to avoid creating customer record unless absolutely necessary, but no sound solutions have been presented so far.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

The topic ‘Fatal Conflict with WP E-Commerce’ is closed to new replies.