Why does “missed schedule” even exist?
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We run a very high traffic site (tens-of-thousands of page views per day), and 100% of the time any scheduled posts or pages result in almost immediately being converted to “missed schedule” status.
If WordPress knows that a post missed its schedule, why doesn’t it just publish the post? Why did someone bother to code up the whole display of “missed schedule” instead of fixing whatever it is that gets something in that state?
I realize there’s likely a very good answer to those questions, but for the life of me I can’t come up with it. Seems like a pretty easy query to write: if (post_scheduled_timestamp) < (current_timestamp) then let the post fly! 🙂
Short of installing some 3rd party plugin, we’ve attempted to solve this in all the official ways, including scheduling a cron job on our server(s). Doesn’t matter. We even moved to a new server with a new build of apache, updated PHP, latest flavor of Centos 7, etc., no bueno. For some reason, posts “miss” their schedule 100% of the time.
Any ideas for us before we all go bald tearing our hair out here? 🙂
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>> We run a very high traffic site <<
With lots of caching? It may be that the caching is keeping WP from seeing the access, which is necessary to publish pending posts.
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It seems you’re using Cloudflare. That may be the issue.
What happens if you set up a “real” cron job that runs every 5 minutes:
0 */5 * * * wget -O /dev/null --timeout=120 https://example.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron=1 >/dev/null 2>&1I use the https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-cron-control/ triggered by an external Cron task.
It’s also a good idea to establish a separate Cron task for any plugins that can be triggered that way. The documentation for those Cron triggered plugins will mention that in their documentation.
Sometimes your site is just too busy for its own good at certain moments. Judiciously missing one Cron task when another needs to run is a good idea but hard to figure out at times. More horsepower helps in those cases also.
And, when I schedule a post, I usually set the time but leave the absolute minute to whatever time it suggested during the scheduling. In other words, a post that is to be scheduled for midnight on a certain day winds up being scheduled for 0 – 9 minutes after that time. E.g., Midnight becomes something like midnight plus 6 minutes or so.
I’m very old… maybe you shouldn’t listen to me either! <Grin>
The external cron triggers the WP Cron itself which then is tasked to run the current tasks in the queue. WP Cron was triggered by the PsuedoCron mechanism which is disabled by the plugin I recommended.
The Crontask as @sterndata recommended triggers the WP Cron to run and still allows the PsuedoCron to run concurrently. I’m not real crazy about PsuedoCron running at the same time a second PsuedoCron or an actual Crontask is triggering WP Cron as it might setup a critical race condition in some subservient tasks.
As to the plugin I recommended… I tend to grab any plugin that seems likely to work and then determine if it still suits my purposes regardless of age. That very plugin is still driving a lot of the sites I run and I figure if it ever breaks on me I’ll probably dive into it and fix it for my own use or try to talk the original authors into revisiting the same.
The rest of the ‘why’ I’ll leave up to the ‘code scholars’ but I’ve suspected critical race conditions within WP Cron setup the queued tasks for failure. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an external Cron triggered plugin task not run except when the whole system or at least the app has died and then restarted.
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