Post Update Delay when Plugin Activated

The mechanisms for sending notifications was changed in the latest version of BPGES. Specifically, when posting a new item – such as an activity update or a new forum post – the following things happen:

1. BPGES queries the wp_bpges_subscriptions table to identify users that ought to receive notifications for the new item
2. BPGES then records an entry in the wp_bpges_queued_items table for each user that is subscribed to notifications – whether ‘immediate’ or ‘daily’ or ‘weekly’.
3. In the case of immediate notifications, an asynchronous routine is then kicked off that triggers the sending of notifications.

The fact that your pageload is being stalled leads me to guess that one of the following is happening:
(a) the system is having a hard time writing to the new database tables. The fact that the writes are indeed happening – the notifications are, after all, being sent – suggests to me that this is probably *not* happening; the writes are likely to be instantaneous, or not to happen at all.
(b) something about the initial triggering of the async send routine is going slowly

My money is on (b). I’d suggest starting by looking at the PHP error logs, to see if there are any related issues there. Then, check the server access logs (Apache, or whatever) and look for admin-ajax.php POST requests. It could be that the requests are hanging for some reason – firewall issues or something like that? – or perhaps that there are lots of redirects taking place, or something like that.

I don’t recommend reverting, but it’s obviously your call.

It’s possible that the WAF could be causing issues. I’m unfamiliar with the details of debugging Sitelock, but you might consider turning it off temporarily to see if it’s part of the problem.

Hi @gmbyrom – Thanks for the report, and sorry to hear that you’re having troubles.

Obviously, it’s not intended behavior for things to move slowly. The underlying changes that took place as part of the 3.9 upgrade are intended to *improve* this sort of behavior, and on the very large installations where I’ve been running the 3.9 code for the past 12+ months, it has worked dramatically well.

I realize that you need to make things work in an acceptable way for your site’s users, and as such, I understand why you want/need to use an earlier version of the plugin. However, please realize that (a) that earlier version of the plugin will never again receive bugfixes, security updates, or compatibility fixes for new version of WP/BP, and (b) unless I’m able to collect information about the nature of the slowness (such as the PHP error log info and other questions posted in https://wordpress.org/support/topic/post-update-delay-when-plugin-activated/#post-11353954), I’m afraid I’ll never be able to identify and fix the underlying problem that you’re experiencing. So, if you are at all able to provide any diagnostic information, it’d help not only you but also all other users of the plugin who might potentially experience similar problems.

I recently discovered what could be a source of the delay. See https://github.com/boonebgorges/buddypress-group-email-subscription/issues/175 for details and a possible mitigation technique. Feedback welcome.