It seems that in my case various plugins and my own past mods have added files to core that are caught by this “Scanning for unknown files in wp-admin and wp-includes”
This scan is useful, but also could be classified as “too much information.”
I deleted (after backup) all the files the file scan found, and WordPress didn’t break. Interestingly, it scanned 53,517 files containing 4.6 GB of data, wow, is calling WordPress “bloated” an exaggeration? Spaghetti for dinner anyone? That’s _without_ plugins!
Doing only this scan did not appear particularly memory intensive so I’m leaving it checked, along with just a few other scan options. I’ve found that the Wordfence scans go much better with most of the scan options OFF, unchecked. I schedule my scans to run once a week, at night on weekends, when memory demands are low.
Feature request, why not move the Scan options to the “Scan” page? Seems a little ridiculous to have them cluttering up the general options page, which is already incredibly long and difficult to navigate.
MTN