iThemes Security 4.2.15 compatibility issue with WordPress 3.9.1?

Lots of people having the same issue and it doesn’t seem that any help from ithemes is forthcoming.

You might find a temporary solution by looking through the threads from the last day.

Hi,

This is likely happening due to the site running out of resources. You can try disabling some of them and see if that helps. A good place to start would be File Change Detection. Also, could you set WP_DEBUG to true and let me know if you see an error when you get a white screen?

Thanks,

Gerroald

Gerroald,

Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, I am not a developer and I am not sure how to do the things you suggested. The issue is with this plug-in because when I disable iThemes Security 4.2.15 – everything works fine.

Is it possible to roll-back to the previous version of iThemes Security until this issue is fixed?

Thanks,
Kate

Hey Kate,

This issue isn’t likely something that needs to be fixed in iThemes Security, although possible.

Try disabling the features one by one to see which ones are hindering your site speed. It’s not necessary to have all features enabled. The idea is to enable the ones your WordPress/server environment will allow.

In your wp-config.php in the root directory you’ll notice a line that looks like this one – “define(‘WP_DEBUG’, false);” Change it to “define(‘WP_DEBUG’, true);”. Then let me know if you see any errors on the white screen.

Thanks,

Gerroald

Gerroald,

I upgraded to Version 4.3.3, but I am still having the issue.

I set DEBUG to true per your suggestion and I see the following:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 93661259 bytes) in /home1/humanpop/public_html/wp-content/plugins/better-wp-security/modules/free/backup/class-itsec-backup.php on line 148

Please let me know how to fix this.

Thanks,
Kate

Hey Kate,

This is what I suspected, you’re running low on resources. There are two options. The first would be to ask your host to increase you PHP memory and max execution time, this could help tremendously. It looks like that error is happening when making a backup, which is likely scheduled and would explain why it seems to happen randomly. The second would be to start disabling features one by one while testing your site. Your configuration and features you’re able to use is going to depend on your WordPress/server environment.

Thanks,

Gerroald

Gerroald,

I contacted my host and we increased memory_limit from 128 to 256M, and max_execution_time from 30 to 60.

Unfortunately this did not help. With DEBUG set to TRUE I am still getting “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 42205519 bytes) in /home1/humanpop/public_html/wp-content/plugins/better-wp-security/modules/free/backup/class-itsec-backup.php on line 148”
I could increase to 512 for memory limit, but I am not sure that would help at this point.

Is this something you could help me with?

Thanks,
Kate

Hey Kate,

I’ll speak with the developer but I’m really not sure there’s anything we can do about this. What you could do is not run backups, it seems you just don’t have the resources for at the time. I would suggest finding a backup solution that does work for you, it’s the most important part of securing your site.

Thanks,

Gerroald

Gerroald,

I disabled scheduled backup and set it to email only, but when I try to do a manual one from the Plugin’s Backup tab, I get the following error: “Something went wrong with your backup. It looks like another process might already be trying to backup your database. Please try again in a few minutes. If the problem persists please contact support.” I tried again in 2 hours – same thing.

“it seems you just don’t have the resources for at the time”
I am not sure how this is possible if everything worked fine until about 3-4 versions of the plugin ago…

Please let me know what the developer says.

Thanks,
Kate

Gerroald,

Please let me know what the developer says about this issue.

Thanks,
Kate

I have the same problem after I updated iThemes security few weeks ago.

The following messege shows every day at least a few times: “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 83368992 bytes) in plugins/better-wp-security/modules/free/backup/class-itsec-backup.php on line 148”

My php memory limit is 268 MB and I am using only 64.54 MB, I already contacted my hosting provider and they increased the limits.

Does anyone have any idea how we can deal with this problem?

Some times error-log files might create these issues. Clean both iThemese Security logs and error-log files [one in root directory, second in wp-admin directory, and third in wp own directory(if wp installed in its own directory)]. It works for some sites if log files are not cleared at regular intervals. Hope this might help for some.

I am getting this issue as well and I don’t have iThemes backups scheduled to run.

Hi All,

I had a same problem and it worked for me just to uncheck option “Enable Scheduled Database Backups”.

Best regards.