heartbeat goes bonkers and spams host with ajax requests every few seconds

[ncslhostmaster]

I have a client who uses 3rd party hosting for their WordPress site. The site has lots of plugins, among them heartbeat control and idle user logout. We have noticed the behavior where, under some condition, the browser starts spamming the host with ajax requests (/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=get_current_status) until the server overloads, runs out of memory and renders all sites and services on the host unusable. I have been reading about this problem on the wordpress blogs and thus have installed heartbeat and idle user logout to address the issue. However, the issue still appears, though less often. Finally today we saw it happening before the overload had taken place, and were able to contact the user, find out what they were doing, and narrow down the possible causes. I am hoping that this will be helpful information for the developers. Here is some specific information that I have to pass on:
1 - The laptop that appeared to be the cause of the problem was logged into the admin interface using the chrome browser. It had many tabs open, some on the same page. The user had been updating pages, switching between tabs, and reviewing the changes. They have both an english and a french area to the site, and were translating from english to french, using copy and past and a translation package.
2 - The heartbeat settings should have limited the ajax connection rate to every 60 seconds, but clearly was not doing so.
3 - Idle User Logout should have knocked off the laptop after 3600 seconds, however, the laptop had been sitting there logged in for 17 hours, idle and it never logged out.
Other notes:
The user also had a desktop computer in another room, and had been doing similar things on it, but using the firefox browser. When the problem was occuring I had the user close down tabs on the desktop, but it did not change the incoming connection rate. When the user went to the laptop and closed the tabs on the laptop, and logged it out, the spamming stopped. I suspect it is a javascript related issue, maybe related to chrome, maybe also related to multiple tabs, that causes the behavior to go wrong.
I would be willing to provide more detailed information if it is needed.
Regards,
Steve

[kirasong]

Hi @ncslhostmaster !

Thank you for the report, and I'm very sorry it's taken this long for a reply.

This ticket was talked about in ​a triage session today.

Folks present noticed that /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=get_current_status was being called in the report, but weren't able to find a get_current_status action in core. This might mean that the action comes from a plugin or theme.

It was also noted that browser behaviors have changed since the time of this ticket, to improve background behavior.

Because it looks like this is likely caused by code outside of core, I'm going to go ahead and close this ticket.

However, if you're still having the issue, I recommend reaching out ​on the support forums, and someone should be able to help you there.

Thanks again!