How to do Background Processing in WordPress Plugins and Themes

As WordPress sites become increasingly more complex, so do the tasks that they need to perform which can often be resource intensive or time consuming. I’m talking specifically about tasks which do not need to be actioned instantly for the user’s request to complete, for example sending emails, API calls or database queries. These tasks should never impede your users, as the last thing you want is for them to be staring at a loading screen. Therefore we need to defer such tasks and process them in the background. WordPress Cron For most, the WordPress implementation of cron instantly comes to mind and it’s used in core to overcome such issues. If we go back to WordPress 4.3, Boone explained the need for splitting shared taxonomy terms and the difficulties involved with performing the upgrade procedure. The solution was to utilise wp_schedule_single_event and process small batches of 10 taxonomies per run. This process would repeat every 2 minutes until all taxonomies were processed. Nice! There is, however, one downside to this approach and that’s efficiency. If we have 1000 items to process and we’re only handling 10 items every 2 minutes, it will take over 3 hours to complete, which #wordpress #smallbusiness #entrepreneur

https://managewp.org/articles/11557/how-to-do-background-processing-in-wordpress-plugins-and-themes