ElegantThemes Monarch and heavy WordPress admin-ajax.php usage

ElegantThemes Monarch is a social sharing WordPress plugin that allows you to place sharing buttons either above the content area, below the content area, or in both.  You can see it in action on this site, at the left side of the screen.

Monarch is a easy to use, feature rich, elegant and easy to install.

Combined with my ElegantThemes developer license, choosing Monarch over other social sharing plugins was no brainer.

While the setup and configuration went as smooth as you can hope for, shortly after enabling the plugin I noticed that my cpanel account is showing HUGE amount of CPU calls, and the RAW logs mentioned tons and tons of calling to the admin-ajax.php file.

At first I thought it was related to my changing hosting provider (later it has proven to be unrelated change that happened at the same time), and that something went wrong during the migration process.

Google search has pointed me towards WordPress heartbeat and suggested to increase its frequency or cancel it completely.

Unfortunately , that didn’t work.

The root cause for me problem was the activation of the “Display share counts” within Moarch plugin settings.

AS soon as I removed that option, the issue was gone, the CPU calls was dropped by almost 85%!

Also, please note, that if you choose to display social sharing buttons in more than one direction, you need to remove the “Display share counts” from each location separately.

It took me more than a week of troubleshooting to pinpoint and fix this problem.

I hope you find this post useful, and that it will save you a lot of time getting this error fixed.

Cheers.
Yasaf.