admin-ajax.php hits

Hello,
just as background about 4 months ago we started updating our website using the wp importer. Each day we generate posts in the form of html code and upload the code to wordpress through the importer.

The importer is working great for us and we havent had any problems.

However, we recently received a notice from the wp support in regards to a large number of 504 errors happening on our site. In this notice they also mentioned “seeing over 1,500 instances of admin-ajax.php being hit from your IP Address […] You would want to look into reducing the number of hits that you are making to admin-ajax.php.” They also told us that this could be related to the 504 errors somehow: “Ajax kind of ties into this in the sense of how large and how often of a request are coming in, and how big does that impact the environment when there are many users.”

In a second conversation with the support team they told us that “ajax requests can be negatively impacting, as an example an ajax request — if you are noticing heaving admin ajax with specific plugins, we recommend you contact that specific developer or team through the codex to see if there is a method of easily reducing these calls or making it less intensive.”

From what i found out online that “WordPress uses Ajax only in the administration screens in order to update the information” and “is also the technology behind the auto-save functionality on post and page editing screens.” It allows the webpage to refresh without any button being pressed.

Since it doesnt seem like we have had this “issue” before we started using the importer and following the advice of the support I am wondering if the ajax hitting is related to our use of the wp importer, and if so if this could be causing the 504 erros somehow….

So how does the importer relate to this ajax? Is it possible that each imported post hits an instance of admin-ajax.php?

Thank you for your reply.