[jbw976]

My bbpress site, running old 1.0.3, has a email notification plug-in that was cobbled together from the following two plug-ins:
* http://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/post-notification/ by Thomas Klaiber
* http://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/moderator-new-post-notification/ by finalwebsites

It looks like those may be so old that they aren’t even available anymore.

Anyways, we have a significant performance problem that is causing ‘bb_new_post’ to timeout. During ‘bb_new_post’, a SMTP call is made using class.mailer-smtp.php for EACH user subscribed to be notified, sequentially.

Since we have thousands of users (hundreds with subscriptions), this synchronous approach causes the new post to timeout and apache returns a 500, it just takes too long.

Someone else has to have already solved the performance problem of sending 100’s of emails for each new post, without it timing out. Any advice? Pointer to a plug-in that already does this? thanks!

[ashleykurtzman]

I’m also having an issue. When someone posts, the post goes through, but it takes them to an error screen. Now in addition the email notifications aren’t going out. I had been using https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bbpress-notify/ which had been working until recently. I also tried https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bbpress-new-topic-notifications/ with no luck.

[jbw976]

@ashleykurtzman, have you checked your apache error logs? wonder if anything interesting is getting logged there (normally at /var/log/apache2/error.log).

Do you have access to your SMTP client/server logs that bbpress would be using to send the emails? There could also be interesting errors being logged there…

[ashleykurtzman]

Hi @jbw976, unforunately I have GoDaddy shared hosting and can’t access the error logs. Any other ideas?

[Jared Atchison]

The info below does not address the OPs question for performance, but rather is an answer to the questions regarding emails being sent out all together.

This does happen unfortuantly and it’s usually do to the server setup. We see this a lot with shared hosting.

The WordPress function that handles email, wp_mail() (more info here), uses the PHP mail function to send it’s emails (bbPress uses this as well). Many hosting environments have a throttle on how many emails can be sent using their SMTP servers, which are used by default.

The solution is to use a different SMTP server/service to send out the emails and not rely on the default one hosting provider’s server uses.

The first thing you will want to do is install one of the many SMTP plugins that are available on the WordPress.org plugin repository. I’ve used WP SMTP before without any issues.

After that’s installed you’ll want to configure that plugin to use your new SMTP service.

Sometimes you can ask your host for this information and by just using their SMTP service through the plugin will fix the issue. Other times it doesn’t, which means you’ll need a new SMTP service all together.

There are a ton of great paid SMTP services available, most should be suitable. SendGrid seems to be a popular one, which gives you 40,000 emails/month for $10.

It’s not ideal that emails don’t always “just work” out of the box, however it almost always boils down to the web host. Especially when some emails send out fine but others don’t go through.