podPress conflicting with WordPress RSS sidebar widget

  • nickmarino

    (@nickmarino)


    14 years, 7 months ago

    Earlier today, my website — http://www.audioshocker.com/ — was experiencing extremely long load times, incomplete loads, and even a few errors trying to connect to the database.

    I was going nuts trying to figure out what was causing the issue. I tested my plugins individually and nothing seemed to change it. Eventually, as a last ditch attempt, I deactivated podPress and the issue went away.

    When I reactivated podPress, I noticed that my RSS sidebar widget was getting a strange timed out error and the load times for my entire site were still taking forever. I couldn’t figure out a way to rectify this issue with the RSS feed. Even scaling back podPress did nothing. So I eventually disabled the RSS sidebar widget and everything is back to normal.

    Thing is, this problem popped up out of the blue. First time I noticed it was this morning. I was running a slightly older version of podPress at the time, so nothing had been recently changed. And the RSS sidebar widget hasn’t been altered, and it was working fine. In the process of troubleshooting, I updated my podPress to the latest version, but even that did nothing to stop the slow load times.

    Has anyone else experienced this issue?

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/podpress/

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author ntm

    (@ntm)

    14 years, 7 months ago

    Nick, which feed URL did you use in the RSS Widget? And which settings? (number of items, Display item content?, Display item author if available?, Display item date?)

    I have tried to use your podcast feed URL in the RSS widget of my blog and I got a time out error on saving the widget settings (RSS Error: WP HTTP Error: Operation timed out after 10000 milliseconds with 615088 bytes received).
    But I tried to save the settings again a moment later and it worked.
    Now, when I open my blog it take clearly more time until the page is completely loaded.
    The loading time depends on the RSS widget and the widget depends on the power of the server on which the feed is. If downloading the feed takes time then loading your blog page with the RSS widget takes time.

    I have opened your podcast feed in my browser (Firefox) a few times and it took sometimes a couple of seconds to load the feed. But the feed is okay and valid.
    (Decreasing the number of posts in the feed or the RSS widget could make the loading time maybe shorter.)

    Thread Starter nickmarino

    (@nickmarino)

    14 years, 7 months ago

    Honestly, I can’t remember if I was using http://www.audioshocker.com/?feed=podcast or http://www.audioshocker.com/feed/podcast — my guess would be the first one, since that’s the old style I remember using when we first started out.

    My settings were: 10 items, no content, no author, no date.

    That’s the same error I got most of the time (with varying amounts of bytes received). Interesting result with the save… I might test it out again.

    Thx for getting back to me! I’m fine with not running that widget, so I don’t really have any complaints about getting rid of it. I posted here mostly because I wanted you to know about the weird interaction that I’d never seen occur before.

    Plugin Author ntm

    (@ntm)

    14 years, 7 months ago

    I have searched a little bit more and found the idea to use instead of the original e.g. the URL of the Feedburner version of the feed in the RSS widget. If a server is slow for whatever reason then it is possible to use a cached version of the feed. The Feedburner servers or servers of other feed proxy service should be always fast enough.

    A different possibility would be increasing the timeout limit of the widget. One way to do that is probably to use the wp_feed_options action hook. By increase the timeout the loading time of your blog would not be faster but it would help to avoid error message and make it possible for the widget to load the feed.

    Thing is, this problem popped up out of the blue. First time I noticed it was this morning.

    Have you change your hosting provider or the server recently? That could eventually explain the sudden occurrence of this issue.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

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