Posts in Sidebar kills Widget screen

In the past (many years ago) this plugin was affected by a similar problem. The problem was present only if the site had a massive quantity of taxonomies. For this reason I removed the list of taxonomies from the plugin, so now the user must enter them manually.

In your case I have no idea why Posts in Sidebar causes the timeout. Have you access to logs on your server?

We do have a TON of taxonomies… is it possible that’s still causing a problem? Our wp_terms table has about 10k records, our wp_terms_relationship has about 220k and our wp_term_taxonomy has about 7.5k.

Also, I do have access to logs though I don’t see anything. We are running on WPEngine and they kill anything that takes longer than 60 seconds – I don’t think it’s actually erroring or anything, I just think it’s taking forever to load up. Is there anything specific you’d be looking for in the logs?

OK so I think I have some new info that may help. In one of our tests environments, we are able to get into the Widgets screen, after about a 50 second load time.

In looking at the Posts In Sidebar widgets that are setup, ones that only have 3 or 4 taxonomies specified, all sections open up quickly, when we click Visibility, it opens up right away. But we do still have some widgets where we have 50 or more taxonomies specified and for those, we aren’t able to open Visibility. It times out on that.

Could have widgets defined with a lot of taxonomies be the issue?

But we do still have some widgets where we have 50 or more taxonomies specified and for those, we aren’t able to open Visibility. It times out on that.

What’s the name of the option where you specified 50 or more taxonomies?

what do you mean when write “we aren’t able to open Visibility”? Do you mean a specific panel? If needed, take some screenshots.

Could have widgets defined with a lot of taxonomies be the issue?

Probably yes. The strange thing is that Posts in Sidebar uses the standard WordPress functions to make the queries, so if you have problems with this plugin, you should have problems with WordPress itself. But I may be wrong.

Let me know about the two questions above, so that I can make my tests. I need to reproduce your situation as much as possible similar in my test environment.

Here are some screenshots. I was able to find one that won’t open all panels and it only has 26 categories.

https://ibb.co/wM1tR5w

https://ibb.co/JqqhhFd

https://ibb.co/m4c7xYm

One screenshot is for a posts in sidebar widget with 4 categories, and then the corresponding screenshot showing what I mean about “visibility” opening. The last screenshot is 26 categories. Visibility panel never opens for that one.

Also, just as an FYI, I’m about to go on vacation for until next week so if you respond, I won’t get back to you until middle of next week.

• This reply was modified 3 years, 11 months ago by dmbrooking.

Ok, thanks.

So, “Visibility” is a button created by a third-party plugin.

Since you have a test environment, I would ask you to make this test: activate one of the standard WordPress themes and disable all the plugins, except Posts in Sidebar, and see if the problem persists. If not, reactivate only one of the deactivated plugins and test if the problem is present. If not, pass to the next plugin and reactivate it and check. Do this until you see the problem again. Write down the name of the plugin that could cause the problem and let me know.

This is a standard way to discover if a plugin has some compatibility issue with another plugin or a theme.

OK, I disabled all plugins except for Posts in Sidebar and the Widgets page still would not load.

Ok, in the next upcoming days I will take a look and let you know here.

In one of my local test site I added more than 16k tags to a WordPress post. The only pages slow on loading are the ones that display that post, i.e. the posts management page or the single post edit page. Also the frontend is slow to load when the post with thousands of tags is displayed. But that’s normal, because the system has to generate a huge HTML code.

The widgets management page, instead, is absolutely normal. The panels of Posts in Sidebar work as expected. No slow loading at all. This is understandable because there aren’t so many tags to be displayed.

So, or I am missing the point of your problem or there is something in your WordPress installation that is causing the problem.