Massive Additions to WP_Options Table

After looking around a little bit, these are processes on the backend…

UPDATEwp_optionsSEToption_value= 'a:16191:{i:1419011820;a:1:{s:27:\"wpua_has_gravatar_cron_hook\";a:1:{s:32:\"40cd750bba9870f18aada2478b24840a\";a:3:{s:8:\"schedule\";s:5:\"daily\";s:4:\"args\";a:0:{}s:8:\"interval\";i:86400;}}}i:1419011825;a:1:{s:27:\"wpua_has_gravatar_cron_hook\";a:1:{s:32:\"40cd750bba9870f18aada2478b24840a\";a:3:{s:8:\"schedule\";s:5:\"daily\";s:4:\"args\";a:0:{}s:8:\"interval\";i:86400;}}}i:1419011832;a:1:{s:27:\"wpua_has_gravatar_cron_hook\";a:1:{s:32:\

These cron jobs are inserting 3MB sized binary logs into the wp_options table were adding up to a Gig within 5-7 minutes.

Here’s the portion of the plugins code that’s responsible for the large updates:

/**
   * Checks whether registered user has Grvatar-hosted image or not.
   * Set the flag in database according to existence of Gravatr image.
   * @uses object $wpua_functions
   * @uses int $blog_id
   * @param int $user_id
   * @uses wpua_has_gravatar()
  */
  public function set_wpua_has_gravatar($user_id=""){
        global $blog_id, $wpua_functions;
        if(!empty($user_id)){
                $flag = $wpua_functions->wpua_has_gravatar($user_id);
                        // Update usermeta
                        update_user_meta( $user_id, 'wpua_has_gravatar', $flag);
        }
        else{
                $blogusers = get_users( 'blog_id='.$blog_id );
                // Array of WP_User objects.
                foreach ( $blogusers as $user ) {
                        $flag = $wpua_functions->wpua_has_gravatar($user->ID);
                        // Update usermeta
                        update_user_meta( $user->ID, 'wpua_has_gravatar', $flag);
                }
        }
  }

For a quick remedy, my host applied max_binlog_files to cap how much in binary log can be written, which takes care of the load for the time being, but it isn’t a permanent solution.

Any idea how we can optimize this code so that it doesn’t attempt to write Gigs worth of data to the wp_options table?