Thanks man — you truly are my favorite dev for a variety of reasons, and none more so than the fact that you provide such thoughtful, patient and timely support. The entire WordPress community is fortunate to have you.
After posting, I realized the high volume of scripts found in the wp-content/uploads/fusion-scripts/ directory, and thought that that may have been the culprit for the exploding cache size, but had hoped not, because it felt a little bit like the nuclear option to exclude all Avada Theme-generated JS. And given that this was never an issue previously (prior to Avada v7.4 I guess), I was even more hesitant to assign the “blame” there.
That said, the issue does indeed seem to stem from the fusion-scripts directory. After excluding the directory about 90 minutes ago, the Autoptimize cache size still sits at just 2%; prior to the exclusion, the cache size was growing to about 12% near-instantaneously (and growing rapidly with each respective page visit from there).
So that certainly seems to have gotten the cache size under control.
I guess the only question now is: how much has the Avada change (and, in particular, the new need to exclude the theme’s entire fusion-scripts directory, much like has long been the case for the fusion-styles directory) going to limit the abilities of Autoptimize in an Avada-theme-based environment? Seems like a good bit of Javascript—historically able to be aggregated by AO—will now be left to the capabilities of Avada itself. Hopefully the theme does a better job handling its own scripts than it has historically, because AO has really been the primary reason I’ve found Avada to be reasonably performant at all.
One more note though on exclusions, and the fact that, historically, it has been a good idea to exclude /fusion-styles, and now that excluding the /fusion-scripts/ directory seems like a must — it looks like the fusion-styles directory is much slimmer than it used to be. I’m wondering if now it might be “safe” to allow AO to aggregate the fusion-styles directory as well..
I’d be happy to remove wp-content/uploads from the list of CSS exclusions and see how that goes, but before I do that, a couple of more related questions if you don’t mind:
– Are you familiar with any of the changes brought by the Avada v7.4 update that might pain a clearer picture of what’s going on now? Is Avada creating separate Javascript files for each page/post now?
– Was the reason for excluding /wp-content/uploads by default on sites built using page builders (like Avada) based in the fact that each page had its own CSS file generated—which, in turn, would cause the AO cache size to grow rapidly—or was it less about cache size and more about correctly applying the proper stylesheet/styles in an appropriate manner?
