NewsMag 1.7.1 killed our server again !

I was sent here for the Shim plugin, is it still in beta mode? Is it ok to use now? VC is killing my server as well as getting multiple emails from Google webmaster tools.

So basically I would upload the plugin and deactivate VC? Can I then delete VC?

Hey!
the shim is still in beta, but I have it working on our two busiest sites and have had zero CPU issues since. (YAY!)

Basically, according to Radu the way it works with the latest VC is that you leave both VC active and the shim “recognizes” that and disables it, but you can still edit pages, supposedly.

In our case I did this:
a) left both VC and shim on server (I’m actually using the January version of VC from 1.6)
b) turn on shim, turn off VC
c) most home page stuff works perfectly; however a few odd elements may NOT work and so you have to choose NOT to use those (not the blocks/modules, or ticker; but couple of the oddball things…)
d) then I turn VC on if I need to edit something on home page; save; then disable VC again.

So, we have VC in plugins folder – otherwise you can’t edit your home page anymore (!). BUT, it’s completely disabled with shim running.

I don’t have “latest” shim version if there is one, mine is still BETA 1.02 … but that works! Yes, it’s still in BETA mode, which is why there isn’t a help item or sticky for that yet, I would imagine. And not everyone needs it; not sure if it works with child themes, as I don’t use those EVER.

Hope that helped.

==============
just downloaded from link, version says:

Version: 1.0 beta 2

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

Thanks for the info Chris, I am about to deploy it now. Will update my findings.

First Findings: Added the Shim plugin, left VC on. According to P3 it’s exactly the same and nothing has changed. Still slow and VC seems to be using a lot of resources.

I have deactivated VC and already seems super fast. Although I am getting this two short codes that aren’t display what it needs to:

[vc_empty_space height=”32px”]

[vc_separator color=”grey” align=”align_center”]

Here is P3 before disabling the plugin:
http://tinypic.com/r/35b5o5u/8

After running P3, this is the result:
http://postimg.org/image/dfvmss621/

I am very happy so far. It would be cool if the short codes would work, but I will trade it in for speed any day.

One thing I did notice was the Smart Sidebar no longer works on the homepage. Not sure if it’s due to me remove the space and top lines, and less room or it’s because VC is no longer active.

Just updated the theme (was quite a few updates behind) and associated plugins and had the problem mentioned here (massive increase in CPU usage). The problem was so bad that I could not even have VC active to modify any pages that needed editing!

Using your temporary Shim plugin which is actually reducing average CPU usage from the working setup before (with old version of theme/plugin).

Any ETA on a editing solution?

@ShowbizCool

as noted in my posts; you need to activate the Visual Composer to “edit” your home page again or anything else using VC. The shim just provides the CSS for the TagDiv modules so they work — there is no other way to edit VC layouts except with VC.

So, you can leave the shim active, turn on VC, then go edit stuff, save, then turn off VC.

That is what I have been doing. Luckily you don’t generally need to keep changing your homepage layout all the time; just tweak stuff. And of course, a sidebar for home page can be edited from appearance > widgets without VC being active.

Hope that helped 🙂

TIP: use the VC version from January (e.g., that came with NewsMag 1.6; 4.4.2) if you have that, as that does allow me to edit stuff without crashing box. I am *not* using the latest VC on any of our sites for anything.

Thanks Chris for your comments.

When I updated I had hoped what you where saying would work. Unfortunately with the VC supplied with 1.7.1 renders the server unusable within a few minutes! Only a restart and quick removal of VC with Firezilla brings things back. I note you are suggesting using an older version which I might try if I am feeling brave!

I edited the code on the front page myself to clean it up. However I have another page which is producing just code on display which I might just have to disable until we have some better method of editing!

I note another popular ThemeForest theme is removing VC from their setup. So seems it is more than us that are dissatisfied with it. Unfortunately it also makes one concerned about NewsMag…

Well.. note that for a “lot” of folks they are not having this “CPU death” issue. But also a lot are. Also there were a lot of conflicts with VC 4.5 and Yoast SEO.

So, not everybody having this issue. I know Radu has been trading email with the Bakery folks to share this experiences (and my server data presumably).

From what I understand, and might not be accurate their plans are:
a) the shim provides a solution for those of us with the CPU spiral of doom, as stop gap – works fine with VC 4.42 on my box — no problem for short term use at all as long as I’m not getting huge traffic spike ( so I check my CPU usage before messing with it )
b) they want to push Newspaper 5 asap; which has the threads of things from Newsmag (sticky sidebar, more layout options for home page; control over the blocks/images, etc.); and presumably will include VC 4.5.4 or whatever.
c) Newsmag 5 would then be a dev track for possibly building their own page builder that does not use VC at all.

So, there isn’t going to be a “death of TagDiv” or themes not working. Mine are working just fine and no need to upgrade anything “right now” for me. So, only reason I upgraded to 1.71 from 1.6 was for security patches.

But try using your old version of Visual Composer — the issue is with VC not the theme, but there is some bizarre combination of things that our particular server does *not* like at all. So, in my case using the 4.4.2 for short periods does work just fine; quickly tweak, then switch off VC, and huzahhh! I won’t install any VC version newer than that. Period. Luckily I’m not using VC for posts or pages; only the HOME PAGE … so in my case unless home page getting whacked, usually not big issue. I also have the addition in my functions.php to NOT load VC code on post pages.

So, delete new version of VC you installed;
reinstall older version of VC (any 4.4x version should work in theory)
leave shim active
turn on VC, and edit your page/layout.

Obviously you should be deactivating any caching stuff while messing with VC changes.

Anyway… mine is working ….

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

The makers of VC are saying to others that having slow servers “I should draw your attention that we are always working on improvements and soon we will roll out another performance improvement round.”

PS Chris, I never said “death of TagDiv”, did someone else?

Hi, sorry, yeah, somebody else thought that continuing to use VC would “demolish tagdiv theme sales and they should switch to something else” — or something like that.

Of course, VC has a nice product, but the past six months it’s become a memory hog, and as you and I have experienced some core issue just whacks certain servers (and we have dual XEON CPUs and 32GB RAM on dedicated premium box … not a VPS or something ….).

Anyway…. try the version of VC you were using previously, for editing.

Is this SHIM being worked on for the Newspaper theme? I have the Newspaper theme and the visual composer problem is affecting us as well? We have Newspaper 4.6.3 running on a WAMP stack. We get 2500 visits a day tops so that may be why it takes longer to affect us than larger sites?

I don’t get CPU usage warnings all I see is that the time to first byte on our site seems to slip everyday. I moved our site to an entirely different server and it helped for a day. The first day the TTFB was 900ms, today it’s 2000ms by the end of the week it’ll be back at 8000ms just like when we hosted it on a different server.

If I disable the Visual Composer, the time to first byte goes from 2000ms to 600ms.

The shim helps keep some of my article elements inline but all the columns don’t work. Disabling the Visual Composer also messes up the sliders on the front page and the shim doesn’t fix that.

Is there going to be a fix for this soon or do I need to manually rebuild my homepage?

I also noticed that if I removed and then reinstalled the Visual Composer Plugin, that it “reset” the issue and I’m back to 900ms TTFB. I presume it will just slip away again though…

• This reply was modified 11 years by pbn.

Well, the shim isn’t going to replace visual composer; it’s a stop gap for those having CPU death spirals. For VC general issues, try going back to the earlier version of VC on your site (e.g., 4.4.2), which you should have from older versions unless you are first time user.

Or, if you choose to use the shim, be aware it won’t work for some of the more oddball things in VC; and it’s not optimized for the Newspaper modules – as far as I know.

For example, working here just fine:
CaliforniaNewswire.com

I have slider, lots of modules on page, and they do work.

Only a few things I was using before do not work with the shim, and I’ve just worked around that.

Sort of too bad as VC had zero problems last year and it’s only been the newer versions causing issues this year (ironically with a ton of junk added people were demanding without knowing how it would impact their little VPNs and $10/month accounts….). All the hacks to WordPress for security this year likely haven’t helped either as obviously a lot of stuff got moved around.

In any case — I’d wait for an official “can I use this with Newspaper 4” answer, as my thinking would be “maybe.”

Thanks Chris. I figured the Shim wasn’t intended for Newspaper but I’m getting the same problems. I just picked this up so won’t have access to older VC versions. Looks like I’ll have to stick to uninstalling / reinstalling the VC plugin every few days till this is resolved.

You might be able to get older version of v.c. On request from tagdiv …

Thanks to Chris for the idea but tried VC 4.4.2 earlier today and unfortunately within a few minutes SQL database had crashed 🙂

So the need for an alternative would still seem necessary. Could someone from the TagDiv team comment on this problem?

Well, they kind of already have … on various threads.

Right now the *only* solution with Newsmag if you have this CPU spiral of doom is to use the shim plugin, and use VC as little as possible beyond the development portion of your home page. Make sure you have a lot of memory allocated to WordPress (at least 256MB from the wp-config.php file in addition to php.ini setting; you must do both!).

We started to see minor spikes once 4.4.2 came out. Prior to that zero issues. Right now we can use it, but anything later not so good. I can’t imagine if WP Bakery haven’t addressed this ins the 4.5x versions, that they still don’t “get it” and are not solving it — seems to be a “if 90% of people can use, the other 10% oh well …” which isn’t great.

Right now TagDiv is focused on (based on posts I’ve seen):
a) Newspaper 5 w/ features of Newsmag + better grid + new version of API.
b) Next Shim beta for use with Newsmag *and* Newspaper.
c) Newsmag 1.8 with bug fixes and minor updates/tweaks.
d) Dev work on possible alternative to using Visual Composer.

So — at the moment if your site dies with VC 4.42 immediately, then it’s clear you might need to go back one more iteration, and/or stick with 1.6 of Newsmag vs 1.71.

I have 2 sites still working with 1.6 and 4.42 without shim, and doing okay, but they are fairly low traffic sites. I have 3 sites on 1.71 with VC442 and the shim, and 2 of these are our larger main traffic sites which were killing MySQL in batches of every 10 minutes or so going from green to yellow to red, and back. Then CPU death.

Not sure any of that helps … not much TagDiv can do beyond the shim, and possibly providing earlier versions of VC to try for your system. Since they don’t develop VC, it’s not something they can “fix” for anybody beyond the reports they have provided to the Bakery folks as a developer/licensor in hopes of solution (and yet to see one).

Some theme devs are already leaving VC in favor of in house solutions or simpler things like Siteorigin builder (free/open source), etc. (( We’re using Page Builder by SiteOrigin with a lean WP home brew Bootstrap 3 theme for a client reporting system along with Advanced Custom Fields, and works well so far for that … )).

Anyway…. I’m sure TagDiv folk will have some reply, but likely not far different from the above rantings 🙂

Of course, it’s possible that the next version of Visual Composer will be better “optimized” …. frankly, I’m amazed they are not working with an example “DOA” server setup, reading the error logs, and trying to find what bit of code is causing the death spiral, and then FIXING it. But I’m behind on stuff for my own business, so can’t really point fingers on that 😉

btw … one trick you can do to clear space to update your home page “quickly….”

aa) turn off caching!
a) restart Apache (kills connections!)
b) turn on VC 442
c) quickly edit your home page
d) turn off VC442

In theory you’ll have short window where the things that were pinging you too much like a scraping bot, etc., will have to restart their queue, and free up a whole bunch of resources.

This is super funky…. but one possible annoying stopgap solution perhaps.

Hi. I was updating the theme from 1.6 but then stopped after reading this discussion. I can’t risk that the new version kills my server. How long till you’ll release a new and fixed version?

Absolutely true. Everything “weird” started with 4.4 and when they started adding a bunch of new things for WooCommerce and adding some things which I think were designed to roll-in things others were selling as extensions/add-ons to VC.

So, for low traffic site, VC 4.42 and Newsmag 1.71 work fine. High traffic site and VC 4.5x .. not so much.

With VC 4.3.5 we never had *any* problems. Newsmag 1.71 good to update to for the WP security fixes, and then try to either use shim, or older version of VC.

AGAIN TO ANY AND ALL: issue *not* with the theme — it’s nothing TagDiv ‘needs to fix’ with new theme version. It’s an issue with Visual Composer from WP Bakery, bundled with theme to provide dashboard and additional widgets for custom layouts. Issue doesn’t impact ALL sites/servers. Oddly it seems worse with those of use with dedicated servers, but really weird things happen. Only real solution — I think — is for VC to fully re-write their code from ground up based on current version of WP, optimize it, and possibly break some things into extensions that most people don’t use. Why have all the code bloat for WooCommerce if not using that on a magazine site?

Anyway…. just my input on this topic since I was one affected. I don’t speak for TagDiv in any way… just my opinions.

Marius/Radu..
going to post this here since relevant to the SHIM users and also those who follow my thread on optimizations … somebody brought up good point I had forgotten about …. any ideas for updating this functions.php element to remove the SHIM css from the post pages … this code you provided for the VC plugin obviously doesn’t work for the SHIM; and I have hunch we might have to put something into one of the booster files also?

——–old code you created to hide VC css from post pages — does not hide SHIM css on post pages————snip:

add_action('init', 'myoverride', 100);
function myoverride() {
remove_action('wp_head', array(visual_composer(), 'addMetaData'));
}

function dequeue_visual_composer_css() {
if (is_single()) {
wp_dequeue_style('js_composer_front');
}
}
add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', 'dequeue_visual_composer_css', 1003);

———-/snip

thank you kindly 🙂

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

Hi TagDiv,

I just sent a request for VC 4.3.5

Going to remove the shim plugin and just use an older version, seems like it’s the better option for everybody. Even for low traffic sites.

Glenn

@gfran5
Be sure to update this also once you have 4.3.5 installed (I didn’t try that .. doh).

Curious how NM1.71 and VC435 work together. In fact, not sure anybody in this thread has actually tried that (not that you should worry it won’t work or anything).

-Chris