Title: Does WordPress Automatically Delete Transients?
Last modified: August 20, 2016

---

# Does WordPress Automatically Delete Transients?

 *  Resolved [JohnnyN05](https://wordpress.org/support/users/johnnyn05/)
 * (@johnnyn05)
 * [14 years, 8 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/does-wordpress-automatically-delete-transients/)
 * I have a wp_options table that’s 2GB large, and 98% of it were transients from
   one particular plugin. I’ve since cleared the table, but its starting up again
   and its 800MB large. Most of them have timeouts set in the past and yet they 
   are still in the db.
 * My question is whether wordpress is supposed to delete them when they are expired
   or is it the plugin’s responsibility to delete them?
 * Thanks for your help!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

 *  Thread Starter [JohnnyN05](https://wordpress.org/support/users/johnnyn05/)
 * (@johnnyn05)
 * [14 years, 8 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/does-wordpress-automatically-delete-transients/#post-2300361)
 * No one??
 * Well that’s OK. After some research, it looks like transients expire (delete)
   when you try to retrieve the same exact transient. If a plugin never tries to
   retrieve the same transient, it will never get deleted.
 * The problem I’m experiencing is that the plugin I’m using is naming the transient
   with an MD5 hash of a URL that contains about 10 different GET variables which
   are generated by 10 text fields. So this means that it’s rare for visitors to
   enter the same exact data, which means the transients are never getting called
   again. Thus the 2GB large table.
 * Perhaps WordPress needs a garbage collector of some sort for transients…
 *  [Seebz](https://wordpress.org/support/users/seebz/)
 * (@seebz)
 * [14 years, 4 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/does-wordpress-automatically-delete-transients/#post-2300448)
 * I had the same problem, so I made ​​a plugin which can be found at this address:
   [https://github.com/Seebz/Snippets/tree/master/Wordpress/plugins/purge-transients](https://github.com/Seebz/Snippets/tree/master/Wordpress/plugins/purge-transients)
 *  [gorky5](https://wordpress.org/support/users/gorky5/)
 * (@gorky5)
 * [14 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/does-wordpress-automatically-delete-transients/#post-2300461)
 * Seebz, thanks so much for this plugin. It’s saved my site. I had a wp_options
   table that was a whopping 5.1 GB and kept crashing my site. I reduced it to 188
   KB by cleaning out all the transient crap that wasn’t expiring and caused my 
   site to run out of memory (I also had to use Clean Options to get rid of a ton
   of jetpack_nonce entries that also weren’t expiring, but that’s another matter).
 * Unfortunately, about 12 hours after reducing it to 188 KB, the table was back
   up to 500 MB, which led me to the purge-transients plugin. It’s kept my site 
   online but I’d like to get to the root cause.
 * Do either of you know which plugin/s were causing your wp_options to fill with
   these unique transients? I’m doing some troubleshooting of my own, and I’ll report
   back here if I find anything, but it would save me time if you already know what
   caused the rogue entries.
 * For the record, my entries seem to follow one of four formats (I think the IP
   addresses are from visitors, as they don’t correspond with my own):
 * transient_DIFFERENT.IP.ADDRESSbookmark
    transient_timeout_DIFFERENT.IP.ADDRESSbookmark
   transient_DIFFERENT.IP.ADDRESSsearch transient_timeout_DIFFERENT.IP.ADDRESSsearch

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

The topic ‘Does WordPress Automatically Delete Transients?’ is closed to new replies.

 * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
 * 3 replies
 * 3 participants
 * Last reply from: [gorky5](https://wordpress.org/support/users/gorky5/)
 * Last activity: [14 years ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/does-wordpress-automatically-delete-transients/#post-2300461)
 * Status: resolved

## Topics

### Topics with no replies

### Non-support topics

### Resolved topics

### Unresolved topics

### All topics