WooCommerce Scheduled Actions Killing Performance? Here’s How To Check

WooCommerce relies heavily on a background task system called"action scheduler". These actions are background jobs used by WooCommerce and WooCommerce extension plugins to run tasks asynchronously.

A good example of this is when a customer purchases a product, scheduled actions are added to reduce the stock number of that product, send the customer a purchase completion email, and send the website owner an email to let them know there has been a purchase. These are just some of many examples of when scheduled actions are used.

When a WooCommerce website is created, the Action Scheduler creates these tables by default:

• wp_actionscheduler_actions
• wp_actionscheduler_logs
• wp_actionscheduler_groups
• wp_actionscheduler_claims

These are usually manageable on smaller websites – However, on more active or older sites, this system is one of the most common (but least obvious) causes of database bloat, which can lead to slow admin pages and website timeouts – which can have a negative impact on customers, sales, and overall website SEO.

How Do Scheduled Actions Hurt Performance?

Every action – completed, failed, or pending – is stored in the database. This can lead to numerous scenarios which can cause performance problems – most commonly, completed actions building up and not getting cleaned up, or failed actions retrying endlessly.

I’ve seen clients with millions of these actions – and cleaning them up can have an almost instant impact on performance, for both the developers or website admins – and for the customer.

How To Clean Up Scheduled Actions:

WooCommerce does provide an automatic cleanup periodically (every 30 days), but this is generally slow on larger tables, it can often timeout – and if it times-out, doesn’t always remove the logs effectively, adding to the overall problem.

Here is how to clean the tables up in SQL:

DISCLAIMER : PLEASE TAKE A BACKUP BEFORE RUNNING ANY SQL QUERY LIKE THIS. JUST BECAUSE THIS QUERY WORKED FOR ME, DOESN’T GUARANTEE IT WILL WORK FOR YOU, AND I ACCEPT NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR DATA LOSS.

DELETE FROM `wp_actionscheduler_actions` WHERE `status` = 'canceled';
DELETE FROM `wp_actionscheduler_actions` WHERE `status` = 'failed';
DELETE FROM `wp_actionscheduler_actions` WHERE `status` = 'complete';

These are safe queries to run on canceled, failed and complete actions – as you probably won’t need to reference them again.

The query can also be run on pending actions, but this should be done with caution – as it would stop any pending tasks from being run, some of which might be needed and would not be automatically recreated – scheduled payments are a good example of this.

If you have a very busy store, you can also change WooCommerce’s default cleanup from 30 days to run every 7 days (or a period of time of your choosing). To do this, place this function in your functions.php file:

add_filter( 'action_scheduler_retention_period', 'wpb_action_scheduler_purge' );
function wpb_action_scheduler_purge() {
 return WEEK_IN_SECONDS;
}

This is the sort of thing my care plans handle each month.