XStore slows down entire site when 8theme.com is unavailable

This topic has 4 replies, 2 voices, and was last updated 1 week, 3 days ago ago by Andrew Mitchell

  • Avatar: Kristjan_Rebane
    Kristjan
    Participant
    August 11, 2026 at 18:06

    Today 8theme.com was temporarily unavailable, and both of our XStore-based WooCommerce sites became extremely slow.
    With XStore active:
    /wp-json/ took about 5.3 seconds
    admin-ajax.php took about 10.3 seconds
    We disabled all plugins, but the problem remained. After switching to another theme, the same requests immediately dropped to about 0.05–0.14 seconds.
    When 8theme.com came back online, the XStore sites returned to normal speed as well.
    It appears that XStore is making a synchronous request to an 8Theme service during normal WordPress requests, and when that service is unavailable the whole website waits for the timeout.
    Could you please investigate this? A license/update/API check should ideally be cached or run asynchronously so that an 8Theme outage cannot slow down customer websites.

    3 Answers
    Avatar: Andrew Mitchell
    Andrew Mitchell
    Support staff
    August 12, 2026 at 07:16

    Hello, Kristjan,

    The issue is that our theme utilizes caches that are refreshed every 3-4 days. This includes clearing caches for demos, plugins, update information, and connectivity checks to the 8theme API. It seems that the cache clearing timing on your server coincided with the server overload at 8theme.

    Best regards,
    8Theme’s Team

    Avatar: Kristjan_Rebane
    Kristjan
    Participant
    August 12, 2026 at 10:36

    Thank you for the explanation.
    I understand that the issue occurred when XStore’s cached API data expired at the same time as the 8Theme server was overloaded.
    However, this still seems like a reliability issue in the theme. If refreshing those caches requires synchronous requests to 8Theme, then the same problem can happen again whenever your API is unavailable at the moment the cache expires.
    Would it be possible to change this behaviour so that API/cache refreshes are performed asynchronously, or that XStore continues using stale cached data when the 8Theme API cannot be reached? A temporary outage of 8Theme infrastructure should ideally not affect the performance of customer websites.

    Avatar: Andrew Mitchell
    Andrew Mitchell
    Support staff
    August 13, 2026 at 19:19

    Hello, Kristjan,

    We will consider opportunities to improve this system and implement changes in one of the upcoming updates.

    Best regards,
    8Theme’s Team

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