Posting to vk.com fails if scheduled

As suggested in the FAQ, you need to talk to your hoster or server admin. Only they can tell you the reason why different requests work differently. Plugin just calls Wodpress function, that call PHP function, that calls system library (cURL). Plugin can’t know why the outcome is different. Only your server admin can tall that.

I am the server admin. And it’s up to you, the author, to know what difference your code / workflow have between pressing button manually, and having it fire through the scheduler. Is there any?

You say “tell you the reason why different requests work differently”. That is the thing. I imagine it to be same request, not different when same post goes to same social network using same settings (just different event origin: button press vs. scheduler).

You say it’s different. Then it’s something in your code that makes it different between scheduler and button press. What is it?

(I have a wild guess maybe it is the way you chain posting to different networks, I know I can debug everything, I can even read the sources and fix it myself ground up, can you please just give me a clue what can be causing this, you are much more experienced in SNAP than I am)

Is there any?

Exactly. There is none in the plugin. Both requests go through the same code.

Here is the difference:

When you press the button – it’s an interactive session in your Browser handled accordingly.

When it’s scheduled, it’s a background process running in some none-interactive thread on your server.

Wild guess? Your server has different timeouts for interactive and background processes.

For example post to Facebook takes 7 seconds.
Your interactive timeout is 10 sec.
Your background timeout is 5 sec.

Interactive request works fine, but server cuts background process with “Connection timed out after 5000 milliseconds” message.

So what is the solution?

Are you suggesting a change to a value in php.ini?

There is no “solution” currently.

To be fair, on the next few attempts to reproduce it, it was working OK even for scheduled posts.
This means it was probably a fluke in hosting or VK API, everything’s fine for now.

To be extra safe, even though it works as it is currently, I’ve made a suggested change of default wordpress value:

// SNAP
// Increased http request timeout from default 5 to 10 for wordpress, used by SNAP too.
add_filter('http_request_timeout', function(){return 10;});

Next time I’m going to get timeout error, I expect it to write “10000 ms” instead of “5000 ms”.

If this will happen again for me, I will raise a suggestion of supporting re-tries. Obviously it works fine, but it can’t work every single time, for different reasons. Just allow for few retries with specified interval and in cases like mine it would probably be fine.

Will run it for another month or so, will close potic as resolved if everything will go smooth. Thanks for your support, @nextscripts!

To be fair, on the next few attempts to reproduce it, it was working OK even for scheduled posts.

Most probably it’s because your hoster’s network or VK API is feeling better right now and posts take less then 5 seconds to complete.