Unable to open entries after creating Playa field

Question

I have just installed Playa but after I created a Playa field I can't edit or publish any entries in the admin panel anymore. When I try to publish or create an entry I get a spinner until it ends with an error "Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 300 seconds exceeded in /home/hospl/public_html/system/codeigniter/system/core/Loader.php on line 341". As soon as I remove the just created playa field I can publish or edit an entry again.

I have EE 2.9.2 running on PHP 5.4.45, Apache2.2.31 and MySQL 5.5.47.

After some further investigation I noticed that when I am in the edit playa field window and I select a single channel with only a few entries I can publish or edit an entry again from the admin panel. As soon as I select a channel in the edit playa field window with a lot of entries (around 30k) the error message comes up again when publishing or editing an entry in the admin panel.

So the issue seems to be triggered by the number of entries in the selected channel of the playa field.

Not sure what to do next, is there a limit to the number of entries in a channel for Playa to work or are there other options I can consider like adding indexes or caching to improve performance and thereby make it work? I am not sure what to do next so any help would be great!

Regards, Tammo

Answer 1

It isn't a matter of being limited to a number of entries, but rather there are just way to many (30k??!!) entries for the system to be able to pull/display before the page times out. Your best bet would be to set the desired sorting option (newest first?) and then limit the number of entries it returns (say to like, 100).

I cannot think of a feasible reason they would need access to all 30,000 and this will substantially speed up load time to the point where the page will not timeout.