Optimizing Tables Running For Hours

Hi,

It is likely that there was a timeout on the server.
Does the process still show as running if you reload the page?

Please could you ask your hosts/server admin to check the PHP error logs for any fatal errors or timeouts?

When I refresh, it is over, but shows it still needs to optimized. I start it again and it runs long again.

Called Bluehost 3x on this issue and spent hours on phone. They have no clue and say they can’t help with the issue.

As far as I know optimize always hangs on the last table (mines a yoast table, not many tables in the y-z range). If your behavior is like this you *should* be fine, although I’d check if the table you’re hanging on is indeed the last one. Could always be a plugin conflict though. Hopefully you backup your database before and after each run. For example, I make backups at least 4 times a week, they shouldn’t take you more than 5 minutes at maximum and that would be for a database much larger than the average site (My database is 3 MB and with a 10MB/s I’m done before I know it, whereas a 500MB site at 1 MB/s would have to wait around 8 minutes).

Thank you for the info. Where do you back up your site? I use a plugin which requires so much space I have to clear old backups every month.

It also requires you to be able to login to your wp site in order to re-install. When your site is down, that’s useless.

Any suggestions?

• This reply was modified 7 years ago by mibtp.

I use just the built-in phpmyadmin export to export my [prefix]_db and also make a separate backup for the posts table. In addition, I use CPanel to make the same but gzipped because restore from backup is easier. Regardless, both of these backups ensure that I have access to my data, which personally I find more important than ease of use (I don’t have to play by anyone else’s rules), but I can see why this solution may not fit everyone else. Personally, I only use the absolute bare-minimum of plugins if I can help it. You wouldn’t rent a Uhaul for a single cardboard box, or rent a limo to drive to the bank; often times, less can be more. Each plugin populates your database and disk and if you, like me, want to shrink your database from 30MB to 3MB, you run the risk of dropping your entire database, also like me twenty minutes after I wrote my original post. In said case, I couldn’t get my backups to work, but manually created them from information stored in my backups. An edge case? Sure, but what if I couldn’t restore from backup through plugin?
IMO & tl;dr If you can access your databases directly, export copies, at least twice a week. Do your Home Directory once a week. Any plugin that requires you to be logged in to worpress (i.e. isn’t easily accessible as .sql or .sql.gz files on your hard disk) then I’d look for a new plugin ASAP.

Sidenote: Yoast doesn’t hang anymore, not sure why.