Relevance of “! None”

  • Resolved Wingers574

    (@wingers574)


    4 years, 4 months ago

    Hi, firstly thanks for creating a very useful tool to help see what is going on. I use it on lots of sites.

    I have read through the help, and also through some of the support threads but cannot find an answer to this question: What does it mean when there is a yellow bar beside a hook, and also the action column has !None by it.

    Intuitively I can see that a Task has been set up, but why would anyone bother setting up a task with no action? Probably a Newbie question.

    Why am I asking?
    I am working with my host to resolve some performance issues. I know that my host rate limits WP_Cron spawning and offload it to some other parallel process so that the servers do not get bogged down with too many requests. They have told me to set up a Cron job through the control panel which will trigger WP_Cron every minute and disable the native spawning in WP when someone visits a page. They have assured me that this gets around the rate limiting problem.

    Right now on multiple sites I can see Hooks which have no action set. I am not asking you to look at anything, but just explain in a few words what the orange lines mean at the start of a row where there is “!None”, and what that means. Is it indicative a problem?
    That will help equip me to pursue the Hosting Company, or the associated Plugin Developer.

    Also if I execute them, then the job is replicated. I cannot delete them without deactivating the associated plugin, and then when I reactivate it they come back.

    • This topic was modified 4 years, 4 months ago by Wingers574.
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  • Plugin Author John Blackbourn

    (@johnbillion)

    WordPress Core Developer

    This is a good question and I should add a FAQ for this because you’re not the first person to ask.

    Usually this is a result of an old plugin leaving its cron events behind after you uninstall it, but it can also be caused by a programmer error.

    You can usually Google the name of the event hook to get an idea of which plugin it belonged to. If it belongs to a plugin you no longer use, it’s safe to delete.

    Plugin Author John Blackbourn

    (@johnbillion)

    WordPress Core Developer

    By the way, if these relate to a plugin that’s currently active on your site but they have no action, then that’s a bug you should report to the author of the corresponding plugin.

    Thread Starter Wingers574

    (@wingers574)

    Thanks for the reply John. I am now in dialogue with the Business Directory Plugin, who inform me they are there for legacy reasons. Every site I have checked that has this plugin has two matching cron jobs with no action. They claim it is ok.

    As you say, I have seen deleted plugins leaving empty cron jobs behind. I guess that is poor programming. The ones I am interested in are the live plugins that have them.

    From my perspective, all I need to know is; it is a problem, or it isn’t, that would help me to use my time efficiently. If they are undesirable, but the fact they do nothing does not impact performance, then perhaps a note to indicate that when you hover over the ! No Action text would be helpful.

    I have many more of these across the sites I look after (130+ sites), they tend to be the same plugins, so I will keep pursuing them.

    thanks for taking the time to respond

    Mark.

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