A couple of months ago, I added some code to a plugin that I wrote to use wp_schedule_single_event() in order to schedule some background processes. These were to keep data up to date and to clear out expired data. I did some testing on a few sites and everything seemed to work great.
A couple of weeks later, I started to hear from customers that their sites were slow. My first reaction was to blame their host or the other plugins that they had installed. More and more customers were mentioning that the plugin seemed to make their site sluggish. The weirdest thing was that I wasn’t experiencing it on any of my sites…until a couple of days go. I was constantly receiving fatal errors that the memory had been exhausted. I inched the memory up further and further until it was over 400MB.
That’s when I discovered my problem. Almost all of those cron jobs that I had been scheduling were still in the system. They never completed. Not only did they never complete…they kept getting added. There were thousands of cron jobs attempting to run every time a page loaded. No wonder I was running out of memory!
That night I could not sleep. I sat up in bed for a couple of hours and after some research, came up with a way to clear out those cron jobs. I used _get_cron_array() to find and un-schedule the jobs I had created. Because the cron jobs were scheduled with arguments, I had to loop through each cron in that array to find the correct arguments to un-schedule them.
Immediately, my site was noticeably faster! Now I had to figure out why it was happening and how to prevent it. After a day of trial and error, I got to a point where everything was running smoothly. Cron jobs were running, then removing themselves from the schedule. Not only that, but my memory usage was staying really low. Yay!
Finally, I was able to release an update for my plugin with the fixes in place. I created a version upgrade routine that would run only once to clean up the mess. I even created a bug fix plugin that we made available for a couple of our customers who couldn’t even have our plugin active without it crashing their site. Run the bug fix plugin, then re-activate our plugin and install the update.
It was a big mess, but I feel a huge weight off my shoulders knowing that it’s been taken care of. Luckily, our customers have been very patient with us.