Title: Variations processing icon never stops
Last modified: December 6, 2018

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# Variations processing icon never stops

 *  Resolved [Kimball31](https://wordpress.org/support/users/kimball31/)
 * (@kimball31)
 * [7 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/variations-processing-icon-never-stops/)
 * I have several products with tons of variations. “Create All Variations” works
   fine the first few times. It takes about 11 seconds to process a batch of 50 
   on my server. But when I get to over 900 variations already created things change.
   When I click “Create All Variations” (still only 50 in a batch) the spinning 
   icon continues to spin and never stops even after 10 minutes. I never get the“
   NN variations added” popup.
 * Behind the scenes, the processing did work. If I reload the page I see the variations
   count went up by 51.
 * I built a test store (environment below), and imported just a few products. Same
   issue. Processing icon never stops.
 * Any suggestions how to fix this?
 * Environment:
    WP 4.9.8 WooCommerce 3.5.2 Storefront 2.4.1

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

 *  [wbrubaker.a11n](https://wordpress.org/support/users/wbrubaker/)
 * (@wbrubaker)
 * [7 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/variations-processing-icon-never-stops/#post-10968645)
 * Howdy 🙂
 * This is going to boil down to a lack of system resources to process the adding
   of variations. Querying variations is very server intensive and that is why there
   is a limit of 50 per batch in the first place.
 * In order to get some further information about this, use your browser’s developer
   tools.
 * Open your browser’s developer tools and inspect the requests to add variations
   under the network tab/XHR. In Chrome, that would look something like this:
    [](http://cld.wthms.co/ufmfz9)
 * The expected status is `200`
    [](http://cld.wthms.co/0yFZIS)
 * And I suspect that on requests that are sent where you don’t receive a verification
   popup and the spinners remain, there is a Status of something other than 200.
   I suspect that the status would be 500 which would indicate a PHP fatal error.
   If that is the case, then we would also expect that there would be corresponding
   error messages logged. You can check in WooCommerce -> Status -> Logs and then
   in the dropdown selector there, find any logs that begin with `fatal-errors` 
   followed by a random string of characters, followed by today’s date. Select that,
   press “view” to view the message. If those exist, I suspect the messages will
   indicate that there is either memory exhaustion or that the maximum execution
   time has been exceeded.
 * Another possibility is that the status would be 502, 503, or 504 – those status
   codes indicate a gateway server has timed out. This is common in the case of 
   reverse-proxying type setups. The corresponding error messages would be logged
   by the gateway server.
 * Resolving this will require that the site is hosted on a hosting plan that has
   sufficient resources to handle the requests.
 * Kind regards,
 *  Thread Starter [Kimball31](https://wordpress.org/support/users/kimball31/)
 * (@kimball31)
 * [7 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/variations-processing-icon-never-stops/#post-10969982)
 * Thank you [@wbrubaker](https://wordpress.org/support/users/wbrubaker/)
 * I’m getting a 504 error. This is on SiteGround shared hosting that I thought 
   was pretty good. I’ll see if there is anything SiteGround can do, or more else
   where. Any recommendations on shared hosting that works well for WooCommerce?
 * **504 Gateway Timeout**
    _The gateway did not receive a timely response from 
   the upstream server or application._
 *  [wbrubaker.a11n](https://wordpress.org/support/users/wbrubaker/)
 * (@wbrubaker)
 * [7 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/variations-processing-icon-never-stops/#post-10969997)
 * Shared hosting and a large number of variations is not going to be a winning 
   combination.
 *  Thread Starter [Kimball31](https://wordpress.org/support/users/kimball31/)
 * (@kimball31)
 * [7 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/variations-processing-icon-never-stops/#post-10974719)
 * Here is what SiteGround said and did:
 * _I have increased the dynamic timeout for the admin-ajax.php scripts, by adding
   the following code in the .htaccess files of the websites. _
    Code:
 *     ```
       <IfModule mod_dtimeout.c>
       <Files ~ ".php">
       SetEnvIf Request_URI "admin-ajax.php" DynamicTimeout=300
       </Files>
       </IfModule>
       ```
   
 * This just buys me some time till the “Create All Variations” script needs more
   that 300 seconds to run.
 *  [jessepearson](https://wordpress.org/support/users/jessepearson/)
 * (@jessepearson)
 * Automattic Happiness Engineer
 * [7 years, 5 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/variations-processing-icon-never-stops/#post-11003477)
 * [@kimball31](https://wordpress.org/support/users/kimball31/) Glad that your host
   was able to help you out with this.
 * I have one question, do you need 900 variations? It is possible to create “Any”
   variations that cover all of the values under the attributes. You would only 
   need the specific variations for all 900+ if you needed a SKU or a different 
   pricing per variation.
 * 
    Link to image: [http://cld.wthms.co/TzOAOn](http://cld.wthms.co/TzOAOn)
 *  [con](https://wordpress.org/support/users/conschneider/)
 * (@conschneider)
 * Engineer
 * [7 years, 5 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/variations-processing-icon-never-stops/#post-11078112)
 * Hi there,
 * We haven’t heard back from you in a while, so I’m going to mark this as resolved–
   if you have any further questions, you can start a new thread.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

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## Tags

 * [504 timeout](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/504-timeout/)
 * [variations](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/variations/)

 * 6 replies
 * 4 participants
 * Last reply from: [con](https://wordpress.org/support/users/conschneider/)
 * Last activity: [7 years, 5 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/variations-processing-icon-never-stops/#post-11078112)
 * Status: resolved