Bringing Down My Website

I see we got a problem. Its complicated.

But, we got a cool plugin here. A few issues though.

Its bringing down my website. Specifically, the Alexa bot and the WP Rocket bots (both the pre-loader and the critical css) will go nuts on this.

The plugin doesn’t seem to do enough to cache, causing these bots to go crazy on my website and break the entire website. It specifically causes a lot of term counts to happen, which leads to the overwelming of the database, and the memory filling up on the server. It then moves to swap files for memor, and its game over as the server waits for memory from the SSD. This causes the game to be lost, as more requests are made for these counts then the database can handle. I see it in Query manager though as other queries acting slow, but its caused by this. Its a slow process for me, it takes about 30 minutes after I enable this, for it to happen. Its also clearly related to the number of terms x posts, so the problem gets exponentially worse as we increase either of these problems.

And just to be clear, turning off the counter doesn’t solve this as the get_terms function generates a count. I suggest you develop a bit better cache.

Also, if you do deploy better caches, I suspect you might want to se a custom table as the Options table (or transiants) will cause heavy usage on a table that is used very frequently for every page.

When a post is changed, you should also remove the cache for all the terms it is associated with. This will prevent the entire cache from always needing to be rebuilt. You may need to clear the parent terms as well.

Lastly, this plugin seems to make duplicates because the filters that are selected may match pre-existing categories/terms. I suggest using this on the terms isn’t the right approach, and that using a faceted search page approach is a better one (because of this). I think that is the path I will take.

Works great on smaller websites, though.