iThemes Security Memory Hog

I’m running iThemes Security on my WP 3.9.1 sites, and I’ve noticed php5 crashing quite often lately. I installed xdebug and looked at the stack trace, and it turns out php runs out of memory right after iThemes tries to perform the db backup.

I’ve increased my memory to 128MB for each site, and it still doesn’t stop it from crashing. I’ve learned my lesson, and I’ll be implementing a cron job to do db backups from now on, but it’s a shame this software can’t work without using up all the memory.

Here’s my stack trace right at the moment of a crash:

2014/05/14 17:45:31 [error] 12398#0: *9087 FastCGI sent in stderr: "PHP message: PHP Fatal error:  Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 524288 bytes) in /home/carol/public/southernsciencesupply.com/public/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 1587
PHP message: PHP Stack trace:
PHP message: PHP   1. {main}() /home/carol/public/southernsciencesupply.com/public/index.php:0
PHP message: PHP   2. require() /home/carol/public/southernsciencesupply.com/public/index.php:17
PHP message: PHP   3. require_once() /home/carol/public/southernsciencesupply.com/public/wp-blog-header.php:12
PHP message: PHP   4. require_once() /home/carol/public/southernsciencesupply.com/public/wp-load.php:29
PHP message: PHP   5. require_once() /home/carol/public/southernsciencesupply.com/public/wp-config.php:95
PHP message: PHP   6. do_action() /home/carol/public/southernsciencesupply.com/public/wp-settings.php:352
PHP message: PHP   7. call_user_func_array:{/home/carol/public/southernsciencesupply.com/public/wp-includes/plugin.php:470}() /home/carol/public/southernsciencesupply.com/public/wp-includes/plugin.php:470
PHP message: PHP   8. ITSEC_Backup->do_backup() /home/carol/public/southernsciencesupply.com/public/wp-includes/plugin.php:470
PHP message: PHP   9. ITSEC_Backup->execute_backup() /home/carol/public/southernsciencesupply.com/public/wp-content/plugins/better-wp-security/modules/free/backup/class-itsec-backup.php:41
PHP message: PHP  10. wpdb->get_results() /home/carol/public/southernsciencesupply.com/public/wp-content/plugins/better-wp-security/modules/free/backup/class-itsec-backup.php:136
PHP message: PHP  11. wpdb->query() /home/carol/public/southernsciencesupply.com/public/wp-includes/wp-db.php:1914" while reading response header from upstream, client: 66.249.65.93, server: www.southernsciencesupply.com, request: "GET /shop/scales-balances-weights-measuring/thermometer-digital-stem/ HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock:", host: "southernsciencesupply.com"