Can I remove transients in the wp_options table of my WordPress install?

mysql database wordpress
Ryan picture Ryan · May 3, 2012 · Viewed 64.1k times · Source

I have recently noticed that my wp_options table seems to be a bit large. It contains 1161 rows, and is about 2.1mb in size.

I have installed Clean Options. It looks like development stopped on the plugin back in 2010, but it still did the job.

I now have a long list of potentially orphaned entries. Is there an easy way to go about sorting these, and figuring out which to remove and which to keep? Also, could this be responsible for causing performance issues with the website?

Thank you for reading, any ideas are welcomed!

Update: The Clean Options plugin returned some transients in the list, which lead me to find out that there are several hundred transient files in the wp_options table. There are a whole bunch that look like:

  • _site_transient_browser_5728a0f1503de54634b3716638...
  • _site_transient_timeout_browser_03df11ec4fda7630a5...
  • _transient_feed_83dcaee0f69f63186d51bf9a4...
  • _transient_plugin_slugs
  • _transient_timeout_feed_83dcaee0f69f63186d51bf9a4b...

and so on. Like I said, there are several hundred rows that take look like this. Is it safe to just dump them?

Thanks

Answer

Lane picture Lane · Aug 16, 2012

You can safetly dump them. Wordpress and some plugins will re-create transients as needed. A transient is more or less the stored value from a complex query. The results are saved as a transient so that the system doesn't have to perform a common query over and over, instead it just looks for the transient if it exists and hasn't expired. Of course, make a backup of your database before making a change lest something goes wrong!

After backing everything up, you can run a mysql statement like this:

DELETE FROM `wp_options` WHERE `option_name` LIKE ('%\_transient\_%')

[EDIT: statement fixed with escape characters, after comment suggestion]

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