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Dear plugin developers,
Today my visitors complained multiple times, that my website responds too slow or does not respond at all.
I have debugged and found out that the reason is the slow mailchimp API server us19.api.mailchimp.com response. The average response time was 25 seconds!!! This problem continued for more than an hour!!!
The example above is extreme, but I have noticed that the plugin makes real-time API requests from the backend, thus slowing down every page load. The problem is so extreme, that I am considering canceling my subscription, since the plugin is breaking my website. No one can subscribe from a broken website!
In details: My server has between 200 and 600 active users per minute. When the mailchimp API is slow, the php-fpm should start another child process to serve the new incoming request, since the other processes are busy waiting for response from the API. It happens that the server has more than 400 child processes waiting API response. At some point the server has no more resources for new child processes and new requests are responded with HTTP Error 502. Lets make the calculation: 400 concurrent processes x 50Mb memory per process = 20GB needed RAM! Usually my server works fine with only 10 child processes!
Please update the plugin, so that the requests to the API are made as a background cron task, instead in real time. Storing the data and sending it to the server later should work fine from my point of view. This will free the php-fpm processes for the real tasks.
Serving content to the visitors is the main task for every website and every resource should be dedicated to this task. I see no reason this plugin to use server resources in real-time and block the response waiting the mailchimp API to respond.
Hoping to get a response from you and an updated plugin soon.
Kind regards
Svet