Test with WP Mail Logging plugin deactivated
What I've seen in this plugin's logs is that notification emails take 3-4s per person who has opted for email notifications from a forum. But notifications for blog posts and pages are much faster. Is there a problem between the Asgaros plugin and the Easy WP SMTP plugin that sends the notifications that is caused by WP Mail Logging plugin?
Yes! Deactivating the WP Mail Logging plugin resulted in that post being published as quickly as one would expect. That's good news so I will leave it off for the time being.
Trouble is, now we've no email logging with which one might discover or analyse an operational problem. I could upgrade Easy WP SMTP to the Pro version to get logging or I could replace it with the upgrade from WP Mail Logging to WP Mail SMTP plugin which includes both the mailer and logging. Unfortunately, both run US$100 annually after the 1st year discount of 50%. I don't know of any other combination of free SMTP and logging plugins that might work better with the Asgaros forum plugin.
Aarggh, that reply from my phone took a long time. There is too much variability that is causing misinterpretation of cause and effect.
That post was very slow to publish despite the initial success in the one-member user group. Too many variables involved to make sense of it. The one thing that seemed consistent was that the original Chit-Chat forum and after downsizing and renamed Discussion have both been pretty consistently slow. All the other new ones have been quite variable as I've played with new and old Category, new and old forums, optimisation tools, usergroups, deactivation of mail logging. Where do I go from here?
EDIT: and that took almost 60s! From bad to worse!