Unusual high query of user meta data

Question

We have a WordPress installation with many plugins installed. The site is not that highly frequented (maybe 10-20 concurrent users). I know the amount of plugins comes at a cost of performance. However, the performance drain was so great we investigated and had the database log the queries for a certain amount of time, because the database thread was always exceeding 100% system resources in our system monitors, which should not be the case with 8x Cores, 16GB Ram, 100GB SSD etc.

After loggin 5 minutes we had more than 220k queries. More than 90% were pretty much the same query (except the user ID changed) in the form of:

SELECT user_id, meta_key, meta_value FROM usermeta WHERE user_id IN (1548) ORDER BY umeta_id ASC

This is obviously not correct and explains the bottleneck issue we are experiencing right now with our DB-Server. We are trying to find the culprit for this, but do not know how to find out what is causing these many user_meta queries.

With the help of the WordPress Plugins DebugBar and Query Monitor I was able to isolate the plugins causing the issue.

They are material-wp (selects from usermeta) and to some sort advanced-custom-fields-pro (selects from postmeta). https://i.sstatic.net/JP0u0.png (usermeta) https://i.sstatic.net/gzrLc.png (postmeta)

They main issue lies within the get get_metadata function and there with the update_meta_cache function.

After contacting the author of the material-wp plugin he probided a quick bugfix which seems to have solved the issue for the massive amounts of usermeta queries.

However, I still would like to improve the database performance.

Any help would be highly appreciated. (Is there a way to disable the update_meta_cache function globaly?

Answer 1

I'm sure there are more sophisticated ways to debug the queries, but I'm not aware of them. So usually when I need to debug WP queries I use either Query Monitor or Debug Bar (with Slow Actions addon) plugin, which can be found on the wordpress.org plugin repository. These plugins help you trace which functions / plugins are slowing the site down. At least for me these plugins have been great help.

I'm not affiliated to any of these plugins and my apologies for giving just a plugin recommendation answer.