Reply To: Performance of Backend super slow

• heytricia

• January 30, 2018 at 9:23 am

I’m seeing major dashboard performance issue in a site that was built about 5 years ago. It relies heavily on repeaters for page modules / layouts. Over time, modules have come and gone – both globally and within individual pages. To make matters worse, the site’s marketing team has duplicated pages to build new ones. (So old meta is carried forward again and again – even though not used.)

Over time, a tremendous amount of unused meta data has been stored for lots of pages. Front-end performance is fine, but the dashboard has slowed to a crawl.

I’ve seen the following statement posted on a few threads that sort of addresses this issue:

“I’m going back to several old threads to report the fix for this problem. As of ACF Pro 5.5.8, flexible fields clean up after themselves when they’re deleted and no longer leave orphan data in the postmeta table.” ~
(https://support.advancedcustomfields.com/forums/topic/data-still-in-db-any-solution/)

Does this mean that as of v5.5.8, ACF started deleted data from fields that themselves have been removed within a page’s dashboard? If so, does this also apply to repeaters (not just flexible content)?

I need to be able to offer my client a solution. It would be good to say that the problem will not be ongoing, and we can try to clean up old instances via the database. It would also be helpful to find guidance on how to convert repeater fields to flexible content fields.