How to Avoid Timeouts When Running Millions of WooCommerce Tasks

Meet Action Scheduler – a scalable processor of large queues of PHP jobs. Learn how to run bulk actions without triggering the “Connection Timed Out” error.

Hosted by Rodolfo Melogli

Masterclass overview

“Every month, Action Scheduler processes millions of payments for Subscriptions, webhooks for WooCommerce, as well as emails and other events for a range of other WordPress plugins. It’s been seen on live sites processing queues in excess of 50,000 jobs and doing resource intensive operations, like processing payments and creating orders, at a sustained rate of over 10,000 / hour without negatively impacting normal site operations” (source: https://github.com/woocommerce/action-scheduler).

If you want to bulk edit 100,000 WooCommerce orders, or bulk delete 1,000,000 WooCommerce products, or bulk re-send 10,000,000 WooCommerce emails with a single PHP hook – you need background processing.

And Action Scheduler, which is developed, maintained, and included inside the WooCommerce plugin by Automattic, can help.

Imagine running an add_action on a huge product query – by using Action Scheduler PHP functions you can queue the jobs instead of running them all at once.

In this class, we will study the default Action Scheduler API functions (as_enqueue_async_action, as_schedule_recurring_action, etc.) and then see how we can use them with specific WooCommerce hooks, so that we can safely run bulk edits or scheduled actions. We will also briefly check the admin interface, which is visible in the WooCommerce settings!

Author, WooCommerce expert and WordCamp speaker, Rodolfo has worked as an independent WooCommerce freelancer since 2011. His goal is to help entrepreneurs and developers overcome their WooCommerce nightmares. Rodolfo loves travelling, chasing tennis and soccer balls and, of course, wood fired oven pizza.

Rodolfo MelogliBusiness Bloomer / @rmelogli

Video Recording & Materials

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Materials

Action Scheduler Docs https://github.com/woocommerce/action-scheduler
Action Scheduler API https://actionscheduler.org/api/
Snippet: Bulk Search Replace SKUs https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-bulk-search-replace-sku/
Snippet: Get All Woo Customers https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-get-all-customers/
Snippet: Send Emails https://www.businessbloomer.com/woocommerce-custom-cron-job/

What you’ll learn

Action Scheduler benefits and API functions

How to run bulk WooCommerce operations with Action Scheduler PHP

Where to find Action Scheduler reports

Requirements

Basic knowledge of PHP and WordPress hooks

Upcoming masterclasses

Tue, March 25, 2025

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