LSCache and Cloudflare

You can use my plugin with these other plugins but any other plugin that uses custom output buffer handlers can interfere with the scan process.

To be clear the message in that screenshot is intended to inform you that your caching plugins can adversely affect the performance of my Anti-Malware plugin, not the other way around. It is important to note that this message is only displayed when the the custom OB handler is detected in the wp-admin area, which means that your caching plugin is interfering with (and potentially caching) your admin pages. This is not the best configuration because caching should only be used on static pages when user-specific content is not displayed. Everything displayed in the wp-admin is dynamic and completely dependent on which user is viewing those pages. It would be futile to cache anything in the admin area and an absurd security threat to display any cached admin pages to any other users.

While caching may help the page speeds on any of the forward-facing static page of your site it would be a mistake to rely 100% on your file cache to serve every request made to your server, therefore it should be a viable option for you to temporarily disable caching on your site (at least for testing and debugging purposes). Additionally (or at least, alternatively), you should be able to exclude the wp-admin directory from being cached at all, which will actually solve all these issues and also ensure that your admin security won’t be compromised by accidentally reveling any cached admin content.

As for your very slow Customizer and Elementor page builder loading issues. Those are most likely internal issues which may only be fixed by the developers when or if better coding leads to a faster interface. However, as my admin warning message indicated, the custom OB handlers in your caching plugins could also be interfering with the performance of other plugins and in your wp-admin pages. So you might want to reconsider temporarily disabling your caching while you retest your sites performance metrics. While your at it, you might even want to run some comparative metrics on your site’s overall load-time and page-speed results (with and without your caching enabled) to quantify the benefits of this caching configuration. If your caching is configured well then you should give you a considerable boost in page speed and overall load times, but I have seen many cases where the site’s performance actually increased with the caching turned off ??

Please let me know if you have any more questions on any of this.

Aloha, Eli

Ok mate,so the lesson here is to disable caching when doing scanning with your tool, correct?

Caching of my admin is always disabled.

That’s a very general summation, but yes, it is safest to disable caching whenever you are performing any kind of file scanning on your site (with any plugin, not just mine). It is also a good idea to delete all you cache files, partly because it will save you a lot of time on the file scan process but also because it is best to get rid of any cache that might have preserved malicious output on your site (otherwise you might clean the source of the threat but still be presenting the same malicious output on your cached pages).

As for “Caching of my admin is always disabled”, I can only say this… most caching plugins use custom output buffer handlers to capture page rendering and save it as cache, and my plugin clearly detected that these custom OB handlers were present when loading the Anti-Malware Settings page in your wp-admin. So, why is your caching software implementing those custom OB handlers in your wp-admin if it is not caching your wp-admin? There is no right answer to this question. My response is that they should not be do this! As WordPress plugin developers we all have to share the same wp-admin and anyone implementing custom OB handlers in your wp-admin is positioning themselves as the ultimate overlord of your wp-admin content and they now have full control over what content is displayed on any given page in your wp-admin, INCLUDING my own Anti-Malware Settings page. This means that we cannot be sure that the performance, operation, or output from my plugin is what I have intended it to be with this OB handler present. Furthermore, if they are truly not caching your wp-admin then they should not be invoking the ob_start function in the admin at all, because regardless of whether of not they do anything with it the simple invocation can adversely affect your page load performance.

I apologize if this is TMI but my OB warning message is there for a reason and the implications of this situation cannot be overstated. It has been my experience that caching plugins (in general) are the least observant of the “play nice with others” rule that is essential in an open source development platform like WordPress ??

Hi @scheeeli

Ok, so I looked into the database and GTMLS is producing the largest amount of queries to autoload what makes the site slow I assume. I can provide a screenshot of this privately if needed. Can this be addressed in any way?

Thanks.

You can go to the wp_options table and change the autoload field from “yes” to “no” on the record with option_name of “GOTMLS_definitions_blob” but that not make you site any faster (in fact it will slow down the scan quite a bit and it might make the site slower to not autoload some values).

Also, just to clarify, it is not producing the “largest amount of queries to autoload”. Autoload is a single query and makes loading all those option values much faster by loading them all in one query than the time it would take to run a separate query for each one of those rows. The option_value for the GOTMLS_definitions_blob might be around 367231 bytes in size and that might seem like a lot when compared to most option_values (which tent to be only single short string that are usually under 100 bytes) but it really still only about 360kb and that’s still only about 1% of your standard PHP memory_limit of 32mb. So I strongly advise you to keep calm and carry on and don’t let some other “clean up” type plugin worry you about an autoload value that might be a few hundred KB ??