Did something change from 5.3x/5.4 to 5.4.1 that optimized DB and XML exports?

Upgrading clears expired transients, which could make your export smaller.

Thanks! What’s an “expired transient”? Please forgive my ignorance.

Transients are like temporary storage. Plugins can use them to store things for a limited amount of time. Say, I wanted to store some piece of data for a week. After the week was over, the data would be deleted and come back empty.

Plugins can use this for all sorts of reasons. If a plugin is getting something from an external site, but it doesn’t want to get it every time, then it can get the data, store it in a transient, and then only get it again when the transient expires.

Some plugins do this well, but others tend to do things a little incorrectly and this can leave old expired data hanging around. The transients are stored in the WordPress options table by default. When WordPress updates, as part of the general cleanup routine, it goes through all the transients and deletes any expired ones. They’re expired, so they can’t be used anyway, so no reason to keep them.

If plugins are piling up transients, then those plugins should have the issue reported to them and have that fixed so that they don’t do that anymore. The cleanup routine is just a general cleanup that happens with updates, it shouldn’t be relied upon to clean this sort of thing up all the time.

Makes sense. Thanks very much for your help! Hopefully this was all it was. ??