When Eway is Slow / Down

G’day Steve,

The plugin now uses wp_remote_post() instead of directly calling the curl functions, but under the covers that actually uses curl if available. When a server doesn’t have curl available to PHP, then WordPress falls back to a couple of other methods.

In short: if it was working before (when the plugin directly used curl), then it is still using curl to connect to eWAY. The timeout is still set to 60 seconds, and in both cases, an error is generated when there is a timeout.

However, I’ll try to simulate a timeout and see exactly how the plugin behaves, will let you know.

cheers,
Ross

G’day Stevem,

When I drop the timeout down to 1 second, I get this error reported on-screen in the credit card field:

eWAY error reported:
Error posting eWAY payment to https://www.eway.com.au/gateway_cvn/xmltest/testpage.asp: Connection time-out

Can you look in your server logs to see if there’s anything logged there?

cheers,
Ross

Hi Ross,

Thanks for checking into this. If I get another one I am going to try and pin the customer down to see if I can get some more detail.

Unfortunately my shared hosting doesn’t give me access to server logs – just the last 300 site errors which is fairly useless.

It could well be that they are seeing such a message and have no idea what it means or what they are supposed to do about it – hence the vague “I don’t think it went through”.

I know that at least 1 of them was on a phone – maybe their phone dozed off after 30 seconds to save power during the transaction and when they touch it again possibly minutes later a screen refresh occurs blowing away the error message ?

Anyway – it sounds like there is no problem with the plugin so thanks again for checking.

Steve

G’day Steve,

Hosting that doesn’t let you see your server logs = bad hosting! However, here’s a possible solution to get you some useful logging.

• grab the file in this gist: private-debug-log.php
• edit it and change $debuglog from ‘/private’ to the name of a folder outside your website root, that is writeable by the web server and you can get to from your FTP account
• upload the file to your site’s plugins folder
• activate the plugin Private Debug Log

(one day I might clean this up and give it a UI for specifying the debug log location; or maybe I’ll never bother since it’s such a simple plugin!)

See if anything shows up in the logs, maybe you’ll catch what’s happening.

cheers,
Ross

Hi Ross,

Thanks – I’ve got that installed now and will check it should I get any more reports of ‘not sure it went through’.

Already it’s proved handy as upon making sure it’s working I noticed a log entry with a date and time 11 hours behind so I’ve asked my Australian webhost why the server isn’t using local time!

You can resolve this one if you like. It seems everything is well with your plugin but I will let you know if anything pops up.

Steve

G’day Steve,

All servers should run on UTC, as yours is. Presentation is a different thing, but the server time should always be UTC.

cheers,
Ross