PHP warning rest-api

Hi there!

Thank you for the update. The System Status Report contains a large amount of information, and forum moderators may remove messages that include too much content directly in the thread.

That is why we recommend sharing the System Status Report using Pastebin and then providing the generated link here.

I forget to mention that we haven’t duplicated products into Dutch therefor all product categories in the second language are empty.. Does that matter?

Yes, that could definitely be related.

If the Dutch product categories exist but do not contain any translated or assigned products, WooCommerce or a related multilingual plugin may still attempt to access linked product data through the REST API, which can sometimes result in warnings like the ones you shared when the expected post object is missing or empty.

To help confirm this, could you please let us know:

• Which multilingual plugin you are using (for example WPML, Polylang, etc.)
• Whether the warnings stop if the second language is temporarily disabled
• Whether all WooCommerce-related plugins are fully updated

You could also try creating or syncing a few translated products in Dutch and then check if the warnings continue appearing afterward.

Hi there!

Thank you for the update. I have checked the system status report and everything is appearing fine on my end.

I have tried to replicate the issue, but I’m not able to reproduce it. To assist you further, could you please confirm if there are any specific steps required to trigger this error? For example, have you noticed whether it happens when visiting the product category page, editing a product, or performing any other specific action?

You can create the staging site using your hosting provider’s built-in staging tool (if available), or you can use the following plugin:
https://ww.wp.xz.cn/plugins/wp-staging/

Once done, please head over to WooCommerce → Status → Tools and do the following:

• WooCommerce transients – Clear
• Expired transients – Clear
• Clear template cache – Clear
• Capabilities – Reset Capabilities
• Regenerate product lookup tables

Once done try to replicate the issue again and see if you still face the same issue.

Are these huge amounts of php warnings also the cause that in Directadmin my Resource usages always says that we have reached the limit?

Yes, a large volume of repeated PHP warnings can contribute to high server resource usage, especially if they are being generated continuously in the background.

Also, could you please confirm whether these warnings are appearing directly in the WordPress dashboard/front-end, or are they only appearing in the PHP error logs?

Hi @kirstinv,

Thanks for the update!

While we’re unable to view the DirectAdmin login, I see what you mean.

Yes, the volume of PHP warnings is very likely contributing to your resource limit issues and the database connection errors. They’re all connected.

Based on everything shared, the root cause is that WooCommerce’s REST API product categories controller is trying to read the modification date of the most recent post in each category. Your empty Dutch product categories (products not yet translated to Dutch) have no posts assigned, so that query returns null and PHP throws the warning. Multiply this across potentially hundreds of API calls and it explains the resource exhaustion.

The most direct fix is to either:

Option 1: Assign at least one product to each Dutch category. Even a placeholder product in each Dutch category would give the query something to return, stopping the warnings immediately.

Option 2: If you don’t need the Dutch category structure yet, removing the empty Dutch categories from WPML’s translation would stop the REST API from querying them.

Given that this is causing database connection errors and resource exhaustion, we’d recommend treating this as urgent and trying Option 1 or 2 as the quickest path to resolution.

Let us know how it goes!

Hi @kirstinv,

I understand why that caught your attention, and thanks for sharing the related thread as well.

In the topic you mentioned, the warnings were ultimately caused by custom code running on the site. The user later confirmed that after adding additional conditional checks into that custom code, the warnings stopped appearing.

At the moment, we cannot confirm that the same applies to your site without first checking whether there are any active customizations interacting with WooCommerce REST API endpoints or product category queries.

Could you please let us know if you currently have any custom code active on the site, for example:
– Custom snippets added via Code Snippets plugin
– Custom functions added in functions.php
– Theme customizations
– Custom WooCommerce REST API integrations
– Third party scripts or plugins that modify product/category queries

If possible, please share the relevant custom code snippets using https://pastebin.com, https://quickforget.com, or https://gist.github.com so we can review whether additional conditional checks may be needed there as well.