Slow form submissions — Job Queue & performance

Estimated reading: 2 minutes

If your form takes 3-10+ seconds to submit, the bottleneck is almost always the receiver API call AFI makes synchronously. The fix is the Job Queue — AFI’s background-processing mode.

Turn on Job Queue

Go to AFI > Settings > General.
Tick Enable Job Queue.
Save.

AFI now hands receiver calls to Action Scheduler (a background-job library that ships with WooCommerce and many other plugins). The form submission returns to the user immediately; the receiver call happens within seconds (or minutes if the queue is backlogged).

When to enable it

Receiver APIs that are routinely slow (HubSpot, Salesforce, some Zoho regions).
WooCommerce checkout integrations — every extra second of API call is a second of user-facing wait at the worst possible moment.
High-volume forms where parallel submissions would otherwise saturate PHP workers.
Unreliable upstream APIs — queued jobs retry on failure; inline calls don’t.

Diagnostics

Settings > General shows live stats: pending, failed, and last run. If pending grows without ever clearing, WP Cron isn’t running.
Failed jobs are retried with backoff. Check AFI > Log for the underlying API error.

Still slow after enabling Job Queue?

Bottleneck is now server-side rather than AFI-side. Check:

PHP memory limit (256 MB recommended for high-volume sites).
Database performance — slow queries unrelated to AFI.
Other plugins running on the form submission hook (anti-spam, analytics, etc.).
Async submit doubling order processing time — if WooCommerce checkout is the path, enable Job Queue; if still slow, server-side resource issue.

Other performance / stability fixes