Wordpress editor 503 Service Unavailable errors

dahayeser

I am finding the wordpress post editor on wp-admin is very slow. When I hit edit on a post it takes a 5 - 10 second to load the edit page. After that is seems to load the standard options on the right hand panel, where you set featured image, categories, tags to the post via ajax calls via the rest api. i.e. https://mydomain.com/wp-json/wp/v2/taxonomies It can take another to 15 to 25 more seconds to load these

There is nothing crazy on the site about 25 plugins, woocommerce, Advanced Custom Fields, Stackable nothing that isn't mainstream and well established. On test environment the editor loads fine albeit it could be 30 seconds before all components are plugged in to the screen.

On our live hosting, (which is a decent level of hosting, not a basement package) some calls are coming back with 503 errors. These aren't calls to plugins, they are calls to core WordPress functionality that are falling over to retrieve the featured image or categories to tag the post with. i.e. https://mydomain.com/wp-json/wp/v2/media/1518

Here is the exact response to the network call - Service Unavailable - The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

To us (the developers) is seems like a server issue. It works on test environment but on live. There are no errors on in the php logs. Sure there are a good few network requests being sent across but nothing out of the ordinary.

If we disable woocommerce it speeds up but that's not an option. Why WordPress loads a lot of woocommerce css and js scripts when we are in the post editor and not editing a product I don't know but this is a wordpress / woocommerce every server is hit with it is not unique to our situation.

I am sure people can't be definitive here without seeing the full picture but based on the info I have provide, It's working on test and nothing in the error logs, I'd appreciate your thoughts. Am I right in saying this really seems like a hosting / capacity issue.

Thanks in advance

Sean

Talisman

Is the website on shared hosting? It's possible that other services are hogging the server resources. Waiting 12 seconds for a connection and a further 8 seconds for a response is extreme.

It has been years since I have used WordPress but I favoured using cloud VMs rather than packages offered by Irish hosting providers for this very reason.

daymobrew

The WooCommerce CSS and JS is likely loaded so that WooCommerce Blocks are available in the editor. You might be able to disable those blocks if you never use them (though you might need code to unenque those files)

Talisman

If you haven't already done so check the logs for the database server to identify queries that are being executed at the time of the affected requests. You may need to enable logging.

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/server-logs.html