Delete old, expired transients from WordPress wp_options table

Piotr Po

Post Expiring

webaware

<p>Delete old, expired transients from the WordPress options table (<code>wp_options</code>), to prevent them from bloating your database and even slowing down your website.</p>
<p>Unless you are using an object cache (like memcached), WordPress stores transient records in the options table. Many transients are given an expiration time, so in theory they should disappear after some time. In practise, because old transients are only deleted when requested again after they’ve expired, many transients stay in the database. After a while, there can be thousands or even millions of expired transients needlessly taking up space in your options table, depending on what your plugins are doing.</p>
<p>Delete Expired Transients schedules a daily task to delete any expired transients from the options table. It performs this operation with a single SQL query, and then runs a second query to find any orphaned expiration records and deletes them too.</p>
<p>There are a few other plugins around that clean up expired transients. This one is written for fast performance, set-and-forget scheduled housekeeping, and maximum compatibility. It uses the PHP time to determine whether transients are expired, not the database time (which can be different). It does only one job, and it does it well with the minimum of resources.</p>
<p>Now optimised for WordPress Multisite.</p>
<h3>Translations</h3>
<p>Many thanks to the generous efforts of our translators:</p>
<ul>
<li>English (en_CA) — <a href="https://translate.wordpress.org/locale/en-ca/default/wp-plugins/delete-expired-transients" rel="nofollow ugc">the English (Canadian) translation team</a></li>
<li>English (en_GB) — <a href="https://translate.wordpress.org/locale/en-gb/default/wp-plugins/delete-expired-transients" rel="nofollow ugc">the English (British) translation team</a></li>
<li>English (en_ZA) — <a href="https://translate.wordpress.org/locale/en-za/default/wp-plugins/delete-expired-transients" rel="nofollow ugc">the English (South African) translation team</a></li>
<li>French (fr_FR) — <a href="https://translate.wordpress.org/locale/fr/default/wp-plugins/delete-expired-transients" rel="nofollow ugc">the French translation team</a></li>
<li>Hungarian (hu_HU) — <a href="https://translate.wordpress.org/locale/hu/default/wp-plugins/delete-expired-transients" rel="nofollow ugc">the Hungarian translation team</a></li>
<li>Norwegian: Bokmål (nb_NO) — <a href="https://www.neonnero.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">neonnero</a></li>
<li>Norwegian: Nynorsk (nn_NO) — <a href="https://www.neonnero.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">neonnero</a></li>
<li>Russian (ru_RU) — <a href="https://translate.wordpress.org/locale/ru/default/wp-plugins/delete-expired-transients" rel="nofollow ugc">the Russian translation team</a></li>
<li>Spanish (es_ES) — <a href="https://translate.wordpress.org/locale/es/default/wp-plugins/delete-expired-transients" rel="nofollow ugc">the Spanish translation team</a></li>
</ul>
<p>If you’d like to help out by translating this plugin, please <a href="https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp-plugins/delete-expired-transients" rel="nofollow ugc">sign up for an account and dig in</a>.</p>
<h3>Contributions</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp-plugins/delete-expired-transients" rel="nofollow ugc">Translate into your preferred language</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/webaware/delete-expired-transients" rel="nofollow ugc">Fork me on GitHub</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>Privacy</h3>
<p>Delete Expired Transients does not collect any personally identifying information, and does not set any cookies. It removes some old information from the database, potentially reducing a website’s exposure to leakage of personally identifying information.</p>


Delete Expired Transients

Now and then, I run across a plugin that is simple, well-designed and fills a need painlessly and efficiently. Delete Expired Transients is just such a plugin.
I have a client whose site uses the Diverse Solutions dsIDXPress plugin, which was bloating the options table in the database with thousands of records containing expired transients. Delete Expired Transients cleaned out the options table and keeps it cleaned out. 
Thanks for a great plugin!



Thanks for a Great Plugin!

Given the preponderance of MySQL-backed transient storage installations, this or something like it really should be part of Codex.



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