sndrs

Hi @mjuhl2003 , good news, found a fix for the issue, and more importantly, I found the root cause.
I’ve added all information below. Good luck! 😉
(credit to my Claude AI companion 😉 )

For me the cause was orphaned post-meta, causing the queries exceed default limits.
By using the plugin “WP Sweep”, I could clean up the orphaned postmeta first and then “optimize” all tables secondly. This fixes the issue.

50% of my post meta table were orphans, and it seems that something in Elementor caused it. You can see that with WP Sweep if you “view details”. So it might be necessary to check orphans later again.

WP Sweep is the easy way via the wordpress admin. On my staging environment, I could also fix it manually in the DB with a SQL query, which also works (don’t forget to update your table prefix in the snippets below):

DELETE pm FROM stg_f5560_postmeta pm 
LEFT JOIN stg_f5560_posts p ON p.ID = pm.post_id 
WHERE p.ID ISNULL;

+ optimize the table:

OPTIMIZE TABLE stg_f5560_postmeta;

If you’re not able to do this, there was also a very general fix without cleanup, by adding the following snippet to your functions.php
But I don’t think it is a best practice, to be honest. It might go wrong, if there’s really an issue with the post-meta size.

// Allow large MySQL SELECTs for PublishPress Notifications
add_filter('query', function($query) {
    if (strpos($query, 'psppnotif_workflow') !== false) {
        global $wpdb;
        $wpdb->query('SET SQL_BIG_SELECTS=1');
    }
    return $query;
});

FYI @rizaprihananto , I guess the DB queries could be improved, so orphaned post meta is ignored, but I’m not an expert… 🙂

For the record, the original DB error below (as my debug log no longer exists)

[24-Mar-2026 20:59:57 UTC] WordPress database error The SELECT would examine more than MAX_JOIN_SIZE rows; check your WHERE and use SET SQL_BIG_SELECTS=1 or SET MAX_JOIN_SIZE=# if the SELECT is okay for query SELECT   stg_f5560_posts.*
					 FROM stg_f5560_posts  LEFT JOIN stg_f5560_postmeta ON ( stg_f5560_posts.ID = stg_f5560_postmeta.post_id )  LEFT JOIN stg_f5560_postmeta AS mt1 ON ( stg_f5560_posts.ID = mt1.post_id )  LEFT JOIN stg_f5560_postmeta AS mt2 ON ( stg_f5560_posts.ID = mt2.post_id AND mt2.meta_key = '_psppno_evtcontposttype' )  LEFT JOIN stg_f5560_postmeta AS mt3 ON ( stg_f5560_posts.ID = mt3.post_id )  LEFT JOIN stg_f5560_postmeta AS mt4 ON ( stg_f5560_posts.ID = mt4.post_id AND mt4.meta_key = '_psppno_evtcontcategory' )  LEFT JOIN stg_f5560_postmeta AS mt5 ON ( stg_f5560_posts.ID = mt5.post_id )  LEFT JOIN stg_f5560_postmeta AS mt6 ON ( stg_f5560_posts.ID = mt6.post_id AND mt6.meta_key = '_psppno_evtconttaxonomy' )
					 WHERE 1=1  AND ( 
  ( stg_f5560_postmeta.meta_key = '_psppno_evtpostupdate' AND stg_f5560_postmeta.meta_value = '1' ) 
  AND 
  ( 
    ( mt1.meta_key = '_psppno_evtcontposttype' AND mt1.meta_value = '0' ) 
    OR 
    ( mt1.meta_key = '_psppno_evtcontposttype' AND mt1.meta_value = '' ) 
    OR 
    ( mt1.meta_key = '_psppno_evtcontposttype' AND mt1.meta_value = '' ) 
    OR 
    mt2.post_id IS NULL 
    OR 
    ( mt1.meta_key = '_psppno_posttype' AND mt1.meta_value = 'page' )
  ) 
  AND 
  ( 
    ( mt3.meta_key = '_psppno_evtcontcategory' AND mt3.meta_value = '0' ) 
    OR 
    ( mt3.meta_key = '_psppno_evtcontcategory' AND mt3.meta_value = '' ) 
    OR 
    ( mt3.meta_key = '_psppno_evtcontcategory' AND mt3.meta_value = '' ) 
    OR 
    mt4.post_id IS NULL 
    OR 
    ( mt3.meta_key = '_psppno_whencategory' AND mt3.meta_value IN ('') )
  ) 
  AND 
  ( 
    ( mt5.meta_key = '_psppno_evtconttaxonomy' AND mt5.meta_value = '0' ) 
    OR 
    ( mt5.meta_key = '_psppno_evtconttaxonomy' AND mt5.meta_value = '' ) 
    OR 
    ( mt5.meta_key = '_psppno_evtconttaxonomy' AND mt5.meta_value = '' ) 
    OR 
    mt6.post_id IS NULL 
    OR 
    ( mt5.meta_key = '_psppno_whenterm' AND mt5.meta_value IN ('') )
  )
) AND stg_f5560_posts.post_type = 'psppnotif_workflow' AND ((stg_f5560_posts.post_status = 'publish')) AND stg_f5560_posts.post_name NOT IN ('revision-scheduled-publication','scheduled-revision-is-published','revision-scheduled','revision-is-scheduled','revision-declined','revision-deferred-or-rejected','revision-submission','revision-is-submitted','new-revision','new-revision-created','revision-status-changed','revision-is-applied','revision-is-published') AND stg_f5560_posts.post_name NOT LIKE 'revision-scheduled-publication-%' AND stg_f5560_posts.post_name NOT LIKE 'scheduled-revision-is-published-%' AND stg_f5560_posts.post_name NOT LIKE 'revision-scheduled-%' AND stg_f5560_posts.post_name NOT LIKE 'revision-is-scheduled-%' AND stg_f5560_posts.post_name NOT LIKE 'revision-declined-%' AND stg_f5560_posts.post_name NOT LIKE 'revision-deferred-or-rejected-%' AND stg_f5560_posts.post_name NOT LIKE 'revision-submission-%' AND stg_f5560_posts.post_name NOT LIKE 'revision-is-submitted-%' AND stg_f5560_posts.post_name NOT LIKE 'new-revision-%' AND stg_f5560_posts.post_name NOT LIKE 'new-revision-created-%' AND stg_f5560_posts.post_name NOT LIKE 'revision-status-changed-%' AND stg_f5560_posts.post_name NOT LIKE 'revision-is-applied-%' AND stg_f5560_posts.post_name NOT LIKE 'revision-is-published-%' AND stg_f5560_posts.post_name NOT IN ('post-status-changed','post-deferred-or-rejected','post-declined') AND stg_f5560_posts.post_name NOT LIKE 'post-status-changed-%' AND stg_f5560_posts.post_name NOT LIKE 'post-deferred-or-rejected-%' AND stg_f5560_posts.post_name NOT LIKE 'post-declined-%'
					 GROUP BY stg_f5560_posts.ID
					 ORDER BY stg_f5560_posts.post_date DESC
					  made by get_default_post_to_edit, wp_after_insert_post, do_action('wp_after_insert_post'), WP_Hook->do_action, WP_Hook->apply_filters, PP_Improved_Notifications->action_update_post, do_action('publishpress_notifications_trigger_workflows'), WP_Hook->do_action, WP_Hook->apply_filters, PublishPress\Notifications\Workflow\WorkflowsController->trigger_workflows, PublishPress\Notifications\Workflow\WorkflowsController->get_workflows_filter_query, WP_Query->__construct, WP_Query->query, WP_Query->get_posts

Hi again @rizaprihananto @mjuhl2003 ,

I enabled the PHP debug logs in the wpconfig, and see there’s a database error related to the publishpress plugin, the moment a notification should be triggered:

I don’t know if you can access the clean debug log (with only this error):
https://airlineassociations.be/stg_f5560/wp-content/debug.log

I hope this can help clarifying what is going on.

thx

• This reply was modified 2 months, 2 weeks ago by sndrs.