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kellyjo
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October 28, 2017 at 3:18 am
There may be a thing called, “outgrowing your host”, and Event Espresso might just have that demand for more.
While I won’t blame EE4 for the event that happened, the server we were on, running at 1 GB was consuming “too many resources”, according to our host. We had actually upgraded the limit for the shared host, which was originally 500 MB.
Unfortunately, my client was on a “shared” server with much more RAM use than others so I had hoped it would fine. Unfortunately, the site did crash and was suspended from the server. Probably not the fault of Event Espresso, but maybe just the strict requirements of my host, and the fact that with supply and demand, comes the need for Event Espresso, so we must move on to a bigger server.
The limit for our host and MySQL is 1,000 tables or 1 GB of data. For some reason, our database was 1.5 GB and had over 500,000 tables.
We have an event, sometimes 2 or 3, every single day, nearly 7 days a week, and have been using Event Espresso 4 since April of 2016. It is the “core” of the website. A lot of tickets are sold, no less than 5 – 10 per day.
So I’m curious if it is possible that Event Espresso managed to create or could have created that many tables in the database.
I am more upset with the host than Event Espresso, but I also am beginning to see just how resource-intensive Event Espresso can be on a page with hundreds of visitors per day, all likely making a request to the database upon page load. Any insight into what might’ve caused the server overload besides the possible other plugins we have? (Only culprit I can think of is the Email Activity logger).
So I am just trying to inquire and clear up the amount of data for Event Espresso and possible scenarios of what may have happened.
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Josh
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October 28, 2017 at 8:46 am
Hi kellyjo,
I checked and Event Espresso 4 creates 36 tables. The People add-on will create a few more. 500,000 tables is an extremely high count. Have you looked at the database to see what those are? If you’re looking at the database the EE tables will include an _esp_ prefix in their name.
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kellyjo
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October 31, 2017 at 12:42 pm
Hey Josh,
I was just curious. It was not Event Espresso at all, but another plugin that logged emails that was consuming entirely too many resources. However, 500,000 was the amount of ALL the records, and there were about 96 tables. Not uncommon for our busy website.
No reflection on Event Espresso. The host we were on decided they were going to eliminate all the “resource hogs”, and so they did… sending just 1 warning email, giving less than a few days to prepare, and then
deleting the website and the database. Thanks WebMazda. I don’t recommend anyone ever going with them as your host. AVOID AT ALL COSTS. Not to bash, but all is fair in being fair. When I attempted to get help, they would do nothing for us. Thus, my client ended up losing thousands of dollars during the Halloween weekend.
Though I would’ve never gone with them to begin with.. I inherited the website from another web developer and didn’t realize their strict restrictions on “unlimited resources”.
It has been fun past few days… but luckily, I did have a fairly recent backup but it did not come without its own challenges for restoration.
Note to anyone: “Unlimited” on Shared is within reason. DO NOT TRUST IT. If you are going to be running a busy website, I highly suggest you get on VPS or Cloud with Event Espresso. Assume that if you are running anything with Event Espresso, you are hopefully going to be a busy business!
As I said, this absolutely no a reflection on the performance of Event Espresso, and I actually highly praise Event Espresso for the powerful tool it is. It can handle Shared hosting, and it does a great job, but Event Espresso should be treated with respect and moved to a higher power server. It is a wonderful money maker, so to the devs of Event Espresso, I know my client appreciates you very, very much. You were the ultimate solution to a problem we needed to solve immediately, as the “script software” before you, custom written by the dev before me, was insanely buggy and just costing my client too much, as I had to keep going in and trying to recollect and fix the script, so I had found you.
But to prevent issues for anyone thinking about going with “Shared Hosting” (even the “Advanced Shared Hosting plan” they told us to upgrade to which is what we thought would make us safe) in the future, save yourself the trouble and go with a quality host, a reputable host, and a better plan.
Nothing is “unlimited” so just accept that you might be limited to certain resources and work with it or pay more to get more. Event Espresso can handle just about anything thrown at it. It has its moments of using high resources, but that just means you’re busy!
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Josh
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October 31, 2017 at 2:13 pm
Hi kellyjo,
Thanks for the update and the kind words! I passed this on to the dev team. That’s really good advice about hosting too.
I can add the hosting company to the “not recommended” list to help guide other users. Is their company name really WebMazda? I couldn’t find a hosting company by that name.
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kellyjo
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October 31, 2017 at 11:03 pm
Hey Josh, thank you and please add them — they should be avoided if using Event Espresso.
I typed in http://www.webmazda.com/ and they did come up.
Avoid the frustrations and headaches and do not go with this hosting company. They might just be a “reseller” company with additional support.
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Josh
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November 1, 2017 at 8:09 am
I see, yeah they look like they’re a GoDaddy reseller.
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kellyjo
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November 1, 2017 at 6:48 pm
My journey of restoring to updating has definitely been a learning experience.
Not only did I have to restore the website, but this was a switch from PHP 5.4 to PHP 7.0. Not always easy. As the web developer for my client, I had written code by PHP 5.x standards, which plenty of it intertwines with Event Espresso, the Wait list feature (for when classes fill up) and the Credit feature (for people who purchase classes and can earn points) I built, so all of this had to be updated.
Luckily, you guys must’ve prepared… Event Espresso was ready for PHP 7.0. And might I say… the performance is truly amazing! Lightning speeds and load time is in milliseconds.
The nightmare is coming to an end thankfully.
And I appreciate your time Josh, for just reading! It was nice to rant about my frustrations! Had to get out that steam! It was also great to figure out that it was no fault of Event Espresso.. as I do swear by it and would refer EE4 to any of my future clients.
Thanks for making my life easier.. and that of my client.
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Josh
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November 2, 2017 at 3:09 pm
Thanks again. We’ve also noticed a big improvement after upgrading to PHP 7 on Eventsmart.com. I’m also sorry to hear about the bad hosting experience, but glad to hear that it’s over. May I ask which host did the site end up getting moved to?
As an aside, if you haven’t checked it out already, there’s a new Wait list add-on available for testing that’s getting finished up before official release. You might be interested in checking that out for your client (it could reduce maintenance work later on compared to using a custom solution).
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kellyjo
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November 4, 2017 at 1:10 am
Hey Josh,
I moved the site over to Vultr.com (aff link).
And I’m happy to see that wait list! Thanks for letting me know! It was really something put together that if a class filled up, it would just show a different button and add it to the wordpress database. Good for knowing whose interested in that class so they could offer more of that same class.
Hopefully you get a credit system up too! Though that might be a bit more complicated. You guys have a source of knowledge out there, so I put together something for the functions.php (custom) file, checked for the “thank you page” (because that’s usually where the customer lands after a purchase), add a credit to the database, along with the customer email address, and it displays a list of who has how many credits.
My client does it manually by looking at the list to see how many points a customer has and if they achieve X points, they get a free class, afterwards, once they use those points, she manually sets it back to 0 or however much the points were (I think she counts 5 or 6 classes per free class or something like that). Nothing sophisticated, but it suits her needs for the time being!
Might be an interesting pitch to the developers! If I didn’t already have a full-time and freelance jobs, I might apply to Event Espresso to help with such features, hehe.
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