Can Slow Site Down / Cause Database Issues If You’re Not Paying Attention

About 18 months ago, we used the premium version of this plugin on one of our sites. Shortly afterwards, we noticed the site was running notably slower than it had been. We isolated it to numerous calls the pricing table was making to the analytics. We benched the pricing table plugin and noticed our site performance improved. We forgot about this incident and decided to bring it back — en masse… using it in a template that was a baseline for automatically / dynamically built based on metadata. Since these tables were now on hundreds of unique pages, the site came to a grind — right when we needed the site to be at its best. It was so bad, our hosting provider said we needed new server hardware even when only serving ~50 concurrent users (we’d handled hundreds without breaking a sweat before). We deactivated the plugin and the site immediately went from being non-responsive/timing out to lightning fast. We replaced all of the AR tables with a Beaver Builder pricing table element and didn’t have SITE performance issues since. However, we had some “database connection errors” at random afterwards. Reason being, loads of analytics data was being written to our database tables, essentially consuming more than 20 GB worth of data in our DBs. This taxed the database because of the bloat. We emptied the tables in the DB and *fingers crossed* will now be free of these issues.

So heads up… I highly recommend at the VERY LEAST turning off this analytics feature and/or limiting how many pages you put these tables on. Also, monitor your resource usage, especially your database size from these “analytics” as they can get large quickly if you’re using them at scale.