Total Upkeep Admin Slowdown

I have the premium plugin and have submitted this issue twice to support over the past weeks but have gottne no response. I have tried to solve/troubleshoot the issue with no success – have had to roll-back to the previous version. The issue occurs on seven separate WordPress installations. After updating to 1.17.4, the WordPress admin becomes extremely slow. Deactivating the base plugin immediately restores normal performance. Controlled timing results

Using Query Monitor on the same ordinary WordPress Dashboard screen:

• Total Upkeep inactive: 0.4676 seconds
• Previous Total Upkeep version active: 0.7076 seconds
• Total Upkeep 1.17.4 active: 9.0696 seconds
• Total Upkeep 1.17.4 settings page: 12.6849 seconds

This confirms that the regression is introduced by version 1.17.4. What has been ruled out

• Total Upkeep Premium is not responsible.
• The base plugin causes the slowdown with Premium deactivated.
• Switching from system cron to WP-Cron makes no difference.
• Switching from Astra to a default WordPress theme makes no difference.
• The same behavior occurs across seven sites.
• Database performance is normal.
• Memory usage is normal.
• External HTTP calls do not account for the delay.

Query Monitor findings

With Total Upkeep 1.17.4 active:

• Total Dashboard generation time: 9.0696 seconds
• Time spent during admin_init: 8.3700 seconds
• Total database time: 0.0421 seconds
• Total Upkeep database queries: 28 queries totaling 0.0046 seconds
• HTTP API calls: approximately 0.22 seconds
• Peak memory usage: approximately 15.8 MB

The delay is therefore occurring in PHP, filesystem, shell-command, cron or process execution rather than MySQL or normal HTTP requests.

Total Upkeep registers this callback on admin_init:

Boldgrid_Backup_Admin_Cron->upgrade_crontab_entries()

File:

wp-content/plugins/boldgrid-backup/admin/class-boldgrid-backup-admin-cron.php:1568

Query Monitor also reports this suppressed warning:

file_get_contents(/home/cerram5/boldgrid_backup/crontab):
Failed to open stream: No such file or directory

Caller:

wp-admin/includes/class-wp-filesystem-direct.php:39

Component:

boldgrid-backup

The Total Upkeep Preflight Check reports:

Method used to read cron: Crontab output to file

The preflight functionality test passes, but the cron-related fields may remain blank for an extended period, and some requests have produced 504 errors. Suspected regression

Version 1.17.4 appears to be attempting to inspect or upgrade crontab entries during admin_init. The command expected to create:

/home/cerram5/boldgrid_backup/crontab

does not appear to create the file, but the plugin subsequently attempts to read it. The process appears to block for approximately eight seconds before the missing-file warning is generated.

Because version 1.17.4 includes changes related to rotating stored cron and command-line cancellation secrets, please check whether:

• upgrade_crontab_entries() is running on every admin request;
• the crontab export command is timing out or failing;
• an empty or missing crontab output file is handled incorrectly;
• the migration completion state is not being persisted;
• the plugin waits or retries before checking whether the output file exists.

Rolling back to the previous Total Upkeep version immediately restores acceptable admin performance.