Michael Clark replied 4 months ago

<p>Thanks, Victor. Determined that it is indeed Formidbale that's pegging the CPU. Visual Views builder takes nearly 3 minutes to load, even when it's the only plugin running. I've tweaked the WP heartbeat, optimized CRON, deactivated and deleted a couple of other less performant plugins (as noted in the server logs for poor performance). That's reduced the endless spinning and crashes. Only hangs the database once every few edits. I've noticed that there's a call out to New Relic, an app monitoring and optimization SaaS, but I do not have this active. It often hangs there, Wondering if FF has that active as part of their CI/CD pipeline. I may spin up a new server, optimize and migrate. See what that buys me.</p>

Victor Font replied 4 months ago

Initially, I thought about Ajax because I've been on LinkedIn all day sending emails and their interface is one of the least performant I have seen. But you said you "Determined that it is indeed Formidable that's pegging the CPU". That means after it hits Apache and then there's some sort of pileup issue even before Formidable gets started processing all of the information in the payload. It could be the payload is too big, which would point to Ajax tweaks again.

If I hedge my bets, I'm something on the server. I think it's a good idea that you spin up a new instance. But since you did all of that investigative work, I suspect you probably know your way around the server pretty well. You might want to look into tweaking the # of PHP workers if you can tweak Apache at the server level. I don't remember the exact process because I did it awhile ago on my server, but Apache's default is low at 20 workers.

You'll have to look up the sizing algorithm, but the number of workers should be well over 200. I think mine are set at 240. It makes a substantial difference in performance if you tweak PHP workers. Research the "PHP workers" topic.

If Apache isn't the bottle neck, the database may need some tweaking and testing. If I remember ANALYZEing indexes rebuilds them. That's a starting point. You should also examine the DB for tables with mismatched character sets, collations, and table engines. All the important attributes must be the same across the board.

The last thing to do is tweak Ajax. Try turning it off to see if it makes a performance difference. I really don't know that it will though. It's like something environment and I don't know what that can be from a Formidable update.

By the way, I did some sleuthing about New Relic. You are rright about what they do, but I can promise you, it's not coming from Formidable.

My development server is up to date with all Formidable add-ons available to an Elite License. I searched my entire plugin directory for any references to "New Relic". It's found in SeoPress and WP-Rocket. It is not referenced in Formidable's source code.

If you can't find anything on your site, it could be something your host has implemented.