[Resolved] trying to update the site goes to timeout due to long execution

I think there's a little confusion here, please correct me if I am wrong.

1) What is PRIME MOVER and "demo website"? As long as I can see based on the conversation on this ticket, you provided access to hidden link where we observed the issue in the beginning. Besides this we don't have any demo website reference.

2) For the migration which happened right after we observed the issue in your site (in very beginning), we provided our own test site on our controlled Cloudways server. You completed the migration and we observed that issue isn't happening in there. It is the same site for which I recently provided you access again.

3) Yes, later you provided a downloadable copy of your website, which I couldn't setup on my local but our 2nd tier team was able to assess the database and since then I am communicating based on their findings. Is this the demo site you are referring to? But I don't think there's any such thing in our notice, except your live site and the CW site (as mentioned above).

Anyways, meanwhile I am communicating with our team, so they can investigate directly in your live site - based on your confirmation about activating/deactivating plugins and caches.

I'll update you as soon as there's more information.

Hello!
I am George from the second tier support and your ticket is assigned to me.

I checked the problem with updating the product that you mentioned.
It appears that you have a small database corruption that can be pretty easily fixed.
You have to remove the postmeta value where the key name is "_icl_lang_duplicate_of" and the meta value is the post ID that you are trying to update e.g. : 22037
This was creating a loop in our logic as the value belonged to another post in the same language.

Such SQL query that you can execute by PHPMyAdmin is:

DELETE FROM `wp_postmeta`
WHERE `meta_key` = '_icl_lang_duplicate_of' AND `meta_value` = '22037';

Do note - you have to adjust the value of "wp_postmeta" to match your site database prefix.

Please make backup of your database before doing any destructive changes on your site - just to be on the safe side 😉

Hello!
Sure, I can share with you what I know...

As you have provided a database dump to us, I used it locally and I was able to reproduce the problem and identify the loop that led to a timeout while updating, caused by an entry in the post meta key "_icl_lang_duplicate_of".
That key had corrupt data - basically pointing the post with id 22062 and signaling that it was a duplicate of the post with id 22037, while both posts were having the same language and different translations pair members (different posts).
So the ID 22037 and 22062 were not in a relation according to our other glue tables, in any other way except the post meta key "_icl_lang_duplicate_of".

I cannot say how this post meta key appeared in the first place and how the corruption came to be - but the issue is pretty clearly noticeable once you can do a step debugging.

Further than that, I have notified our developers of this possible scenario and the implications that it could create, and so it will be taken into consideration.

I can point you to some of the tools, but I cannot describe the whole process of debugging the issue. It involves knowledge of WordPress and its hooks (in this case "save_post" hook -> https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/hooks/save_post/ ), WPML plugins, skills and experience.

I use a LAMP/MAMP stack locally (hidden link) with an installed and configured properly Xdebug plugin for PHP (hidden link) and an IDE - in my case PHPStorm (hidden link) but you can use also VSCode or Eclipse (another personal favorite of mine) or Netbeans.

A good starting tutorial you can use is: hidden link