Auction Settings - Auction Status and Processing

Check Auction Status and Auction Processed Simultaneously

What is the need for these two parameters?

Every auction has its own end date and time. When we were initially designing this software, there was a need to run a background job which can check auction's end time and can suitably expire it at same exact time. In Wordpress, these background jobs can be managed via server cron jobs but we did not want our users to access their hosting server's settings to setup these cron jobs. We wanted to implement it in our plugin and expose certain configuration parameter to control the functioning of these background jobs. 

We chose Action Scheduler as our background job queue.

• Check Auction Status: This parameter checks the auction status in whatever minutes you have specified. Two minutes is default setting. 
• Auction Processed Simultaneously: This parameter signifies the total number of auctions that will be processed per request. "Twenty Five" is the default setting.

How does these parameter help performance of your website?

Many users often ask us the question as to what kind of servers are required for running this plugin or why our servers are getting slow? 

You need to understand that the hosting servers that one will have his/her website should be in accordance with the traffic that one expects for it. This is independent of our plugin. Go through this article to decide - What sort of hosting should I choose?

If you are planning to host many auctions and expect a good amount of traffic then please choose correct hosting to support such operations. Having said that, you as admin can use above two parameters intelligently to prevent performance issues for your hosting servers. Let us take an example:

• You plan to auction 200 products on your website which will end at same exact time. 
• You have a good amount of traffic i.e. 5000 visitors per month and expect 10% simultaneous users during the closing hour of all 200 auctions.

During the closing time, if background job queue will attempt to change state of all 200 auctions and also process other ending formalities like sending winning emails etc., if you have best server configuration then too your site's performance will be affected due to mere size of database queries and foothold accessing your website. To handle this, one can set below:

• Check Auction Status = 1 minute
• Auction Processed Simultaneously = 50 auctions

Above will ensure to distribute the processing of all 200 auctions in 4 minutes and thus prevent any performance bottleneck. 

Please do note that above is just an example to explain the working of the parameters. Use them what best suits your scenario.