Thanks for your thoughts about Wordfence.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “completely kills the Apache service” as we haven’t had something like that reported before. I looked to see if you had created a post for this issue but didn’t find one in the free or premium support areas. Without knowing about the issue we can’t help solve it. ??
Wordfence is installed on over 3 million websites – shared, VPSs, self hosted, etc. On the majority of sites it runs without an issue. I did try to profile your site on fastorslow.com but it never loaded for me at all. Eventually I was able to load it but only if I loaded https://convexum.net/ first. If I tried https://convexum.net/ it wouldn’t load at all. After hitting the https:// version once it seemed to let me browse directly to the https version. Going back to fastorslow.com (click here for the report) I was able to see the site scores low for performance in general. I didn’t see Wordfence in a view source for the code so I assuming that you uninstalled Wordfence as you said you were going to. Looking at the data in the report you really seem to have a problem with large images on the site that aren’t optimized or cached at all. A CDN would probably help tremendously. In most of the 13 locations we are checking from it takes between 5-7 seconds to load the site (India strangely enough only takes a little more than 2 seconds). Your overall performance score was a 32.
I believe GoDaddy is your host and we have many sites hosted there without issues. I would guess (because obviously I haven’t been in your site to see how many and what type of plugins you have installed, what the server resources are, etc) that adding a CDN and some caching to the site would improve it. I don’t believe, based on what I can see, that Wordfence is your problem. If there was a message that says it was, it is highly likely that Wordfence is just the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. GoDaddy may be able to shed more light into this by looking at the server error logs. You might also be able to increase the memory allocated to PHP by adding code to the wp-config.php file as described here but that’s not a guarantee it will help as the server doesn’t have to respect that request.
If you want to open a support post we can continue this discussion as the review section is not the place for support requests. If you prefer to continue without Wordfence then we wish you luck with the security provider you choose. However, you will keep running into these issues if you don’t fix the underlying performance problems you already have.
Thanks, stay healthy, and stay safe!
Tim
