Query Monitor is detecting an excessive (and frequent) number of Gravatar HTTP calls in the backend.
This condition is impacting our website performance. This is not a unique issue, it affects all of your plugin users. As a result, we are blocking the HTTP calls via PHP code.
I’m sorry, but there is no way to disable this feature. It is designed to work this way.
In case you want to say thank you! 🙂 We'd really appreciate if you leave a good review on the plugin page. This is the best way to say thank you to this project and the support team.
Unfortunately, that is not acceptable on the basis that:
1. Prior to Revision 7.6.31, the issue was not present.
2. There is an excessive (and unnecessary) number of backend HTTP calls to www.gravatar.com
3. Blocking all gravatar calls in the backend have not produced any issues on the frontend.
So, based on the above:
1. Please explain why so many HTTP calls now?
2. How can we limit the number of calls to once daily? I highly recommend updating your plugin to reflect that in action scheduler. Also, until your plugin is updated, please provide a code snippet or wp-config rule to accomplish this.
The request is sent to retrieve avatars from Gravatar.
If you don’t want to make so many requests, you can remove the values from the two following options so that the requests are not sent.
In case you want to say thank you! 🙂 We'd really appreciate if you leave a good review on the plugin page. This is the best way to say thank you to this project and the support team.
Unfortunately, what you provided will not work since we are using one of the fields as noted below.
Again, the gravatar.com HTTP calls are excessive and unnecessary. Please update your plugin code to introduce a scheduled action (cron) that will check the gravatars once per day (not every 10-20 seconds).
To verify our findings (again), please install the plugin Query Monitor to view the HTTP calls and frequency.
The development team has been informed about this topic. I’ll update this thread once there’s any news for you.
In case you want to say thank you! 🙂 We'd really appreciate if you leave a good review on the plugin page. This is the best way to say thank you to this project and the support team.
Update: So, Query Monitor no longer shows the backend API calls from gravatar.com, but our php_errorlog (see below) is still detecting and receiving a huge number of gravatar.com API calls per hour/day.
This is unacceptable.
We are blocking the API calls generated by your plugin, and are not having any issues on the backend/frontend.
In short, please fix your plugin to stop these API calls from gravatar.com. Also, please update your documentation to reflect what your plugin is doing in the backend.
Sneaky and excessive (or unnecessary) API calls do not help anybody.
