git-updater: Slow AJAX performance for admin users

We are noticing GitHub Updater causing serious performance impacts on the front-end, on the order of 1-10 seconds per request, including AJAX requests. We have traced it to get_remote_repo_meta() being called on every request, in the following code path:

This seems very wrong; get_remote_repo_meta() seems like it should only be called in wp_cron scheduled events, correct?

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 6 years ago
Comments: 28 (28 by maintainers)

Commits related to this issue

only run on `admin-ajax.php` if attempting sequential shiny updates Fixes https://github.com/afragen/github-updater/issues/723 re-write if statement for clarity and not adding `null` to array — committed to afragen/git-updater by afragen 6 years ago

Most upvoted comments

🙌🏼 I’m glad we were able to find a solution to this. Thanks for reporting it and for all the work and testing you’ve done.

BTW, it’s the second shiny update without a page load in between that requires the run on admin-ajax.php 😉

afragen on Oct 17, 2018

On develop, I confirmed that the admin-ajax.php requests finish in ~0.8 seconds now instead of ~12 seconds in the environment above (25 GHU-aware plugins/themes present on vanilla WordPress in a local vagrant).

Also confirmed in the Pressbooks environment, frontend and backend AJAX calls dropped from ~7 seconds each to ~800ms each (700ms with GHU deactivated). Sounds like a success to me!

I also tested a shiny update (clicking “update now” on the Plugins page for a GHU-aware plugin with pending updates), and it worked fine.

Re: REST, if it were me I wouldn’t bother trying to create a real REST endpoint…the admin-ajax.php one you built works just fine, and I don’t think you can get away from the AJAX dependency because of the shiny update system in WordPress core.

Thanks for your time on this one!

figureone on Oct 17, 2018

Will check out the develop branch and let you know. Thanks!

figureone on Oct 17, 2018