Background
Prime Mover 1.3.8 is now available. Although a minor maintenance release (as part of our 2-weeks maintenance cycle) this will have big impact on how you are using Prime Mover particularly in the way you are doing export, etc.
Change log
- Fixed: Block third party code from interfering export process.
- Fixed: Incompatibility with Advanced Scripts plugin.
- Fixed: Incompatibility with WP All-In-One Security.
- Fixed: Incompatibility with Xcloner backup plugin.
- Fixed: Performance issues on export process.
- Fixed: Usability issue on plugin action links.
- Fixed: Freemius incompatibility issues.
- Fixed: Usability issues when multisite only has a main site as the site.
Better export process compatibility
One of common/recurring issues with Prime Mover is unable to properly backup/export process. Based on our issues tracking, most of these issues are from third party plugins conflict. If you have noticed, while the export is ongoing – third party plugins are active in the plugins directory .
Some plugins are supposed to be harmless – but some are not. Some plugins introduce third party code that interferes with Prime Mover export processes such as archiving, database dump, etc. There are many plugins in the WordPress repository and that is impossible to add a compatibility fix to each of them!
The strategy of solving this problem is very simple. Detect when an export process action is initiated and when it does, deactivate all plugins at runtime so this won’t interfere at any stage of the export process. This won’t harm the site because the deactivation happens on runtime and will happen only on Prime Mover export requests. All other requests – no change.
Technically solving this problem requires a bit creative approach. Prime Mover does this by:
- Add a new MU plugin to WordPress MU directory (must use plugin).
- This plugin always runs (cannot be deactivated) however the deactivation sequence only runs on Prime Mover export AJAX requests. All other processes are bypassed/unaffected.
- When export process on Prime Mover is requested – MU plugin will deactivate ALL third party plugins except Prime Mover.
- Prime Mover runs the export processes.
- As designed, there is no possibility of third party plugin conflicts because they are deactivated.
- Ordinary users on front end, cannot see this event since they are on a different requests (WEB get requests and that is different from Prime Mover requests.)
- This solution is applied to both multi-site and single-site.
There is no need for third party code to run while the export is ongoing, since all the processes should rely only on Prime Mover plugin and WordPress core – none of those plugins are needed.
Better export performance also
Not only compatibility issues are fixed here – the change also introduces significant performance improvements. Here area few stats (before and after testing ). The after improvement figures are indicated in bold.
Export runtime (BEFORE) – 227 seconds
Export runtime (AFTER) – 151 seconds
Export average memory usage (BEFORE) – 48 MB
Export average memory usage (AFTER) – 13 MB
Export maximum memory usage (BEFORE) – 64 MB
Export maximum memory usage (AFTER) – 28 MB
Same site size (more than 1GB site) and all factors remained constant during this testing. Only the Prime Mover plugin versions are changed. Actually the bigger your site, the more you can benefit from this improvement!
In summary, using Prime Mover 1.3.8 translate to faster export runtime and lower RAM usage!. We also have CPU data and also smaller (1.13 before and 0.96 after – tested on 8 core machine).
Usability improvements
Prime Mover 1.3.8 has even better usability improvements on Freemius customer on-boarding. There should be no more fatal errors and license activation issues that can be very hard to fix for first time customer.
We also have improvement regarding the plugin action links based on this user suggestion (thanks) .
Other big usability issues dealt with this release is the main site only multi-site. Note that main site export and import is only supported on PRO features. However FREE version supports unlimited sub-sites! To avoid this confusion for first time users having only main site as their site, we show a user friendly notice.
Users interested with Prime Mover without a sub-site should create a new sub-site in order to test Prime Mover FREE version. Or user should upgrade to PRO version if he needs to backup/restore main site.
This is one time notice, if user will click the understand button. It will be shown again.