Error on refresh?

Um. Hm. I can’t replicate this and haven’t ever heard of a problem like this. It sounds more like a network connectivity problem than anything else. Are you experiencing any other intermittent network failures or is the symptom isolated to this plugin only? If you’re on a shared host you might consider asking them if they’re having any trouble connecting to google.com recently, too.

Given that there’s no update on this over a week, I’m going to assume this was in fact a network connectivity issue.

I am getting the same error on my site iFarm.ie It is intermittent and when I update the page (no changes, just clicking update) from the admin area the error will go away for me. However, other users will still experience the same problem. From a quick search it appears to be happening for other users using Google Docs with the error Error requesting Google Spreadsheet data:Operation timed out after 5000 milliseconds with 0 bytes received] showing up in search engine results.

Again, it seems like a connectivity issue between your server and Google. Be sure to check with your hosting provider about any network failures that may be affecting traffic from their network towards Google.

Another thing that might help in this situation is to increase the default cache time. If the problem is intermittent network failures, increasing the time that the plugin keeps a copy of the spreadsheet data will make it less likely that a network problem happens at the same time as the data from the spreadsheet is being requested.

You can use the expire_in attribute to set a long cache time (in seconds). The default is 600, which is ten minutes.

Question for the plugin author. Would it be possible to create a static cache of the pulled data? In my case I have a price list that at the most changes once every 24 hours but right now every single time someone hits the price list page it will pull the data from Google’s servers and thanks to the low IO performance of my server I’m running into timeouts.

Would it be possible to create a static cache of the pulled data?

If you’re asking about caching the whole page from your WordPress site, you should use a caching plugin dedicated to that (there are many). If you’re asking about whether those plugins will cache the output of this plugin, the answer is yes, that’s what they’re meant for.

If you’re asking about caching ONLY the response from Google containing your sheet data, this plugin includes its own cache specifically for that, and defaults to caching data for ten minutes. This cache uses the WP Transients API, which means the cache is saved in the WP database (not in a static file on the filesystem, again, use a caching plugin for that). You can increase the cache time on a per-table basis by adding the expire_in attribute to your shortcode and supplying a number of seconds for the cache to live. In your case, something like [gdoc key="ABCDEFG" expire_in="86400"] might be sensible (86400 is the number of seconds in 24 hours).

The only time each and every request made to your page generates a new HTTP request to an HTTP datasource for your table data (like a Google Spreadsheet or a CSV file) is when you explicitly disable the shortcode’s cache by specifying use_cache="no" in your shortcode and don’t use any other page cache.

It might also be the case for any or all of you that the amount of data that you’re trying to load is simply taking longer than the default 5 second HTTP timeout to get from Google or the CSV file’s server to your webserver. If this is the case, you can increase the HTTP timeout for a specific shortcode by using the http_opts attribute to set a long timeout. Here’s how to set the timeout to 20 seconds:

[gdoc key="ABCDEFG" http_opts='{"timeout":20}']

Be careful setting this too high, though, because, unless you’re sure your dataset is huge, this can obscure the real problem (a bad connection, misconfigured routing tables, an underpowered remote web server, etc.).

For large datasets, consider increasing both the HTTP timeout and the cache expiry time.