No-ish? I have a theory about it though.
I talked to my host (godaddy) about the problem, and they insisted it had to be something on my end, probably a plugin. I have since learned that’s their usual cop-out, they pass the buck right back to you. But at the time, I took them at their word. I turned off all my plug-ins and turned them back on one at a time to see if I could isolate the problem.
This did result in the removal of a bunch of plugins I had played with, but was no longer using, so my site was better for it. But it didn’t solve the problem.
Over time, I learned more about how to speed up your site. Mine was godawful slow, so I did all the things the various blogs suggested to speed it up. In the meantime, I learned about web site speed tests and how to read a waterfall chart. Things got better as I worked on it, but there was one thing I couldn’t control, and that was my time to first byte.
TTFB is how fast the server responds. Google says average Time to First Byte is 100-500ms. On a fast day, mine was 4-6 seconds, but it was often 13-16 seconds.
I know correlation is not necessarily causation, but the slower my TTFB, the worse the duplicate problem was. In fact, it got so bad it stopped making duplicates altogether, and I would get inactivity timeout errors instead. I developed a theory.
Now someone else reading this later may laugh at my bad understanding of how things work, and will explain why this theory is totally impossible. Please do. I will be happy to learn more. But for now, I am not a programmer, just an artist who needs a web site to sell stuff, and I’m doing what I can.
So here’s my theory. When I hit duplicate, my computer is telling godaddy’s computer to go into my product database and copy a product. Godaddy’s computer then says to my computer, “I got your request, BRB”. Godaddy’s computer then makes a duplicate in my database, and lets my computer know it’s done.
When my TTFB was long, godaddy’s computer was busy, and wouldn’t take the time to let my computer know it got the request. So my computer would keep asking over and over until godaddy’s computer would finally say “oh yeah, got your 30 requests, here you go.” When it was really bad, godaddy’s computer would be so overwhelmed it would say “I can’t even right now” and that’s when I would get an inactivity timeout.
Any call to godaddy was pointless. They would say all was fine on their end, must be one of my plugings. So I learned to workaround it. If my waterfall said TTFB was long, I wouldn’t work on the site. I’d wait for a time when the TTFB was only in the 4-6 second range.
If it was doing the too many duplicate thing, I learned I could kill the process early by hitting stop on my browser. If I did it right, I might get only 3-4 duplicates instead of 24-30. I stopped throwing out the duplicates, which was it’s own nightmare. Instead, I planned on adding multiple products based on the one I was duplicating at that moment. If I didn’t use them all, I left them there for future use.
But things got worse. As I said earlier, my TTFB kept getting longer and longer. It got to the point the site itself (not just my backend) would get a timeout error. I had made up my mind that we were not going to wait for our contract to expire to jump to a new host. The problem was clearly on godaddy’s end, and they were not going to do anything about it. I was just waiting until February, our slow month, so I would have time to deal with moving the site.
And then magically, about 2 weeks ago, my site is suddenly lightning fast. My TTFB today is 165ms. It’s never been in the millisecond range. Never. My backend runs smooth. I don’t get duplicates anymore. I haven’t called godaddy to ask, but I’m guessing they either moved my site to a new machine, or fixed whatever was wrong with the one I was on.
So sadly, no, I didn’t solve the problem, the problem “magically” solved itself. As far as I can tell the problem was on the hosting side, and godaddy would never admit there was a problem.
Deb
