I upgraded to WordPress 5 back when it was still in preview, and wasn’t shocked to find some issues. When I would create a post, WordPress would go into an auto-saving loop. Now I like the idea of background saves to prevent data loss if by browser falls over … but the instant the auto-save would complete, another would kick off and the editor was basically unusable (copy content / refresh page / paste content / cross fingers that the auto-save loop didn’t happen that time). I tried setting the auto-refresh interval in the config file, but that had no impact.

With the 5.0.0 release, I was dismayed to find the problem lingering but 0.0 releases usually have some quirks too. But two dot-dot releases later, and a lot of frustration that auto-save has caused waaaay more data loss in six months than years worth of browser glitches ever managed, I started researching the problem to find a solution other than “wait for the next release to fix it”.

I came across an issue on GitHub which not only reports the same issue, but included a bit of code to add to the theme functions.php file:

add_filter( 'block_editor_settings', 'jp_block_editor_settings', 10, 2 );

function jp_block_editor_settings( $editor_settings, $post ) {
	$editor_settings['autosaveInterval'] = 2000; //number of second [default value is 10]

	return $editor_settings;
}

And my WordPress is usable again!