Google News Advanced 1.2 slows down site

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    • #32991
      Pål Johan Karlsen
      Participant

      Dear Status301,

      We had to deactivate the plugin Google News Advanced 1.2 because it has started slowing down our WordPress adminstrator panel and uncached content (average delay: 10 secs, se example in the enclosed file).

      Any thoughts?

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    • #32993
      Pål Johan Karlsen
      Participant

      The specific problem seems to be all the external requests so your website, https://premium.status301.com/.

    • #32994
      Pål Johan Karlsen
      Participant

      The plugin doesn’t seem to have been updated for two years.

    • #32995
      RavanH
      Keymaster

      Hi Paul Johan, thank you for sharing the info about the slowdowns. We’re looking into it right now and I’ll come back to you as soon as we find something.

    • #32997
      Pål Johan Karlsen
      Participant

      Thank you. After some research we realized that Google News don’t really do much with the news meta keywords anymore: https://searchengineland.com/google-drops-support-meta-news-keywords-tag-292493

    • #32998
      RavanH
      Keymaster

      One question: could you go to Settings > Google News > License tab, then select “Check license” and hit Save, then let me know if you get an error message that says “An error occurred, please try again.”? I wonder if there is some kind of problem reaching the update server from your site…

      About the plugin updates: there is one coming soon that does include some updates to the plugin self-updater routines but I’m not aware of a fix for any admin slowdown. Nor did we get any other reports about this, so that is why I wonder if there is something else going wrong.

      Still, I can send you the development version if you are willing to test it. It would help us figure out if there is something that needs to be done before release 🙂

      Please let me know!

    • #32999
      RavanH
      Keymaster

      Yes, meta keywords is largely ignored at this point. We kept it because it is still demanded by users…

      We’re considering other features, which you can vote for here if you wish 🙂

      • #33042
        Pål Johan Karlsen
        Participant

        Dear Rolf, thank you so much for your kind follow-up. Our original license expired almost exactly year ago (with no updates we didn’t see the point in updating it). When we encountered the problem with a slowdown we updated the license. And then yes, we did hit “Check license” and click “Save” and there was no error message at that stage (the old message about the expired license disappeared). We deactivated the plugin, which speeded up our site, and then activated the plugin, which slowed down our site.

        We try to keep our number of plugins to a minimum so we decided to stop using Google News Advanced for now.

    • #33035
      Armando Torre
      Participant

      I have the same problem

    • #33067
      RavanH
      Keymaster

      Hi Armando, thank you for reporting. Is that with the latest version of the plugin?

      We’re still trying to figure this out as we’ve not been able to identify the cause yet…

      May I ask your website’s physical hosting country? It may be related to a large distance to our server in Europe.

    • #33072
      Pål Johan Karlsen
      Participant

      Our website is in Europe and has not moved, so distance does not seem to be the issue for us. The problem became noticeable around September 29. Did something change on your server or your website around that time?

    • #33075
      RavanH
      Keymaster

      Indeed the distance should not be a problem.

      The weird thing is that this call to our server (checking for updates) should only happen during the wp_version_check cron job for privileged users. And so it should not be able to slow down your normal admin responses at all, just like any other plugin or core update verification or auto-updates.

      The DOING_CRON constant needs to be set to true for the update check to happen during normal admin browsing… IS anything other than WordPress core defining the DOING_CRON constant? Do you have some plugin running that interferes with WP_Cron maybe?

      And even then, the license is only checked (the EDD_SL_License->check() in your log) once per week, and the response is then stored as transient data. Do you have a plugin that deletes transient data that has not expired yet?

      So in short, two mysteries here that I cannot imagine happening on a normal WordPress installation:
      1. Why would the update check happen during normal admin browsing? It should only run when DOING_CRON is true.
      2. Why would the license check run more often than once a week? It should store the license status as a transient in the database.

      I’ll be searching further…

    • #33076
      RavanH
      Keymaster

      Hi Pål Johan & Armando, can I send a modified plugin zip for you to test?

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