ElasticPress Incompatible with WooCommerce Subscriptions

[KyleAtDND]

Have you searched for similar issues before submitting this one? Yes

Is this a bug, question or feature request? Bug

Describe the issue you encountered:
ElasticPress appears to be incompatible with WooCommerce Subscriptions. Aside from receiving sync errors (not sure if that is an issue with WC Subs or something else), the main things is that the subscriptions do not charge the donations on renewal. I have experience this error with PHP Caching plugins, so I believe it has something to do the way the data gets updated in certain places.

Current WordPress version: 4.9.4

Current ElasticPress version: 2.4.1

Current Elasticsearch version: 4.5

Where do you host your Elasticsearch server: Hosted on same Cloudways server. 2GB Vulture.

Other plugins installed (WooCommerce, Simple Redirect Manager, etc..):
Broken Link Checker
Custom Upload Dir
Download Attachments
Duplicate Post
Easy Theme and Plugin Upgrades
ElasticPress
Email Login
Enable Media Replace
Google Analytics Dashboard for WP (GADWP)
Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms Duplicate Prevention
Gravity Forms MailChimp Add-On
Gravity Forms Partial Entries
Gravity Forms Salesforce Add-On
Gravity Forms Signature Add-On
Gravity Forms Zapier Add-on
Heartbeat Control
Imagify
Imsanity
JSON API
JSON API Auth
JSON API Workers
Mailgun
Media File Manager
NinjaFirewall (WP Edition)
Optimize Images Resizing
OptionAdmin
Really Simple SSL
User Role Editor
WooCommerce
WooCommerce Address Validation
WooCommerce Authorize.Net CIM Gateway
WooCommerce Name Your Price
WooCommerce Payment Gateway Based Fees
WooCommerce Stripe Gateway
WooCommerce Subscriptions
WP Crontrol
WP Edit Pro
WP Rocket
Yoast SEO

Steps to reproduce:

1. Install ElasticSearch and Sync
2. Have active subscriptions that create renewals

[lkraav]

I also filed https://github.com/Prospress/woocommerce-subscriptions/issues/2529 for tracking upstream a few weeks ago.

[nprasath002]

@KyleAtDND

Aside from receiving sync errors (not sure if that is an issue with WC Subs or something else

Can you provide the error log?

@lkraav
I am not able to view the issue linked above. Let me know if its resolved?

[lkraav]

I am not able to view the issue linked above. Let me know if its resolved?

No, not resolved, everybody is trying to gather more data. I happen to have super limited time to help at the moment.

[KyleAtDND]

@nprasath002 There actually wasn't anything in the log when this was going on. The only errors I received were in the WP CLI and the ElasticPress dashboard when I hit sync -> it would almost always do something like: get to 31/32 synced and freeze there and then maybe show an error message.

[nprasath002]

Unfortunately we cannot access the codebase to Premium plugins thus restricting our ability to efficiently assist in regard to this issue. We recommend reaching out directly to your Premium Plugin provider

[KyleAtDND]

@nprasath002 The license for WC plugins allows me to send it to you for testing this. What about if I sent ya'll the plugin file?

[lkraav]

Yep, I also have a 5-site license where I have domain names left over, so could easily share.

Overall, price of premium plugins is usually negligibly cheap in comparison to any outstanding issue. I will hereby upgrade my workflow towards offering free licenses to upstream developers, where for relevant issues, I look to carry the cost for a year or whatever the plugin license allows.

[KyleAtDND]

What do you say @nprasath002, does that work?

[brandwaffle]

@KyleAtDND we actually run WooCommerce Subscriptions on an internal site, so we tracked down that license. We're investigating and will update you shortly.

[KyleAtDND]

@brandwaffle Thanks! Let me know if there's anything we can do.

[brandwaffle]

@lkraav is there a way to get access to the Prospress issue? I'd love to see what's been discovered on that end as I dig in over here.

[lkraav]

Access is up to @thenbrent

Thus far, he provided a single comment on the matter, as follows:

No experience with ElasticPress, but these symptoms sound typical of broken object cache.

For a similar issue, see #1776 and #1770 where we had to change how we did things to work around Memcached issues. Specifically:

Memcached ... doesn't play nicely with expirations, provided in seconds, greater than 30 days. Expiration values greater than 30 days are treated as timestamps and therefore all TLC transients with an expiration > 0 expire immediately. All TLC expiration parameters are at least 1 year long.

What's more, expired Memcached transients don't get deleted but can be fetched before they are then cleared/expired.

Are there any gotchas with ElasticPress we should be aware of before going into the rabbit hole?

[thenbrent]

@brandwaffle I’ve just invited you to that repo so you can view that issue.

It’s worth reading my latest update, as this issue may not be worth the time fixing now seeing as we are moving away from using transients/object caching for related orders in the next minor version.

[Ritesh-patel]

Hi @thenbrent is the minor update fixed the issue? @lkraav @KyleAtDND can you guys also confirm the same?

[lkraav]

Hmm, http://dzv365zjfbd8v.cloudfront.net/changelogs/woocommerce-subscriptions/changelog.txt does not show anything new wrt to topic at hand for the latest minor version.

[thenbrent]

@Ritesh-patel @lkraav the minor version hasn't been released yet - v2.3.0 is the version it will be included in.

[allan23]

Hi @thenbrent, does this mean that the issue will be resolved in 2.3.0 when released?
Just clarifying that you are not awaiting anything on the ElasticPress side.

[KyleAtDND]

Yes, very curious on this. Would be amazing to be able to use ElasticPress with WC again!

[brandwaffle]

Appears resolved based on a review of WooCommerce Subscriptions Github issue #2529. Closing this.