Prior to GP Premium 1.10.0, we used a library called Image Processing Queue to add on-the-fly image resizing for your featured images.
We were pretty happy with it until we started seeing some reports of databases getting lots of entries in the wp_options table related to the background process. When these “jobs” are initiated, something called a “transient” is added to your database to track the job. When the job is finished, the transient is cleaned up and that’s it. However, it seems like in some rare cases, those transients weren’t being cleaned up.
This isn’t something we’ve been able to reproduce on our end using multiple different servers/environments, which is a good thing, as it means it’s not something most people are affected by. However, it also makes it tricky to fix the problem, and even a few people being affected by this was enough for us to want to completely scrap the library and start over, so that’s what we did in 1.10.0.
Is this something you need to worry about? Definitely not. It’s not a security issue, and if you haven’t noticed any frontend issues, chances are the library is working just fine on your server.
If this issue has affected you, it’s still nothing to worry about. Simply update to GP Premium 1.10.0, then use a plugin like Transients Manager to delete your existing transients.
If you’d prefer a non-plugin method, you can search your database for the transients (inside your database manager):
SELECT * FROM wp_options WHERE option_name LIKE '%wp_image_processing%'Then delete them:
DELETE FROM wp_options WHERE option_name LIKE '%wp_image_processing%'