WF not scanning is a symptom of a larger problem
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First, I apologize that this is very long, I wanted to make sure that I included anything I’ve discovered that could be causing this problem. I can post the full outputs of the plugins I mention here. For now for brevity (HA!) I’ve copied only the failures.
I’m having a problem that’s affecting WF along with the sites themselves. I’m posting here in hopes that a clue as to why WF isn’t scanning unless manually initiated might point me to the root cause of all of the problems.
I’m using the latest version of WF – 6.0.15 but this was updated today. I know for a fact that the below issues are present with 5.x that I upgrade from a couple of weeks ago and in 6.0.14 which I manually upgraded from this afternoon.
This is a self-hosted Ubuntu Linux 14.04LTS/Apache/ISPConfig server that had 2 WP installations (two others were dropped but WP is not being run in multi-site configuration) migrated to it in April from a server that was running a no longer supported version of the same OS. I -think- what I did was copy the directories, set permissions, create and import the databases. It was done in a marathon build/migration and a few things are foggy. ??
Ever since the migration, a few things have been happening in WP.
1. WF does not scan unless manually initiated. When I looked on 07/29/2015 (I have screenies), the last scans were on April 29th and May 07th for the 2 sites. Today, My last scans were 07/29/2015 – so only manual scans are occurring, unless I add a plug-in which seems to spur the automatic process and then complains about WP being out of date and WF being out of date – 2 items that should automatically update – then if left alone they both update by themselves, then not again until the next time I log in and add a plug-in.Periodically – not all the time – I see the following at the top of the Live Traffic page: “Notice: An unexpected error occurred. Something may be wrong with www.remarpro.com or this server’s configuration.” There’s more but it’s cut off on my screen – it’s to the effect of try the support forums for help. I’ve googled and prowled the support forums for hours and not found a solution to this particular server’s setup/problem. I’ve seen it elsewhere too, but I don’t recall where – probably in the updates screen but it was two weeks ago that I last saw it.
2. Within WP itself, No plug-ins are flagged as needing to be updated, nor are the updates to core. Once I go to “Add Plug-ins” I can often see that there are some that need to be updated. Once I do this or sometimes if I initiate a manual WF scan – finally I will see updates that need to be done. Sometimes this does and sometimes it doesn’t include WP core. I currently have one site that’s convinced that 4.2.3 is the latest, and the other updated “automatically” to 4.2.4 today after I went in and tricked it into realizing it was out of date – by going to add plug-ins and installing HTTPS-Debugger. The second site was still unconvinced though even after adding HD.
3. Any admin screens are terribly slow – 30 seconds to display to approve comments, save a draft, etc.
As best I can tell, most of the people complaining of this are having https problems connecting to https://api.www.remarpro.com. I ran the https-debugger plug-in right after installing it this afternoon and everything looked good – all steps green / passed. When I ran it a few minutes ago, it failed step 7:
7: [FAIL]: Verifying api.www.remarpro.com resolves correctly. 66.155.40.203
I ran the Background Update tester – all pass but the last one:
WARNING: Couldn#8217;t retrieve a list of the checksums for WordPress 4.2.4. This could mean that connections are failing to www.remarpro.com
Which from my reading is a problem I probably can’t fix and some think might be transient. The thing is, every single time I check in Background Update Tester, it’s failing and I sincerely doubt that those WP servers are that unreliable. Either way, I suspect that this is the core of the problem that’s making WP painfully slow and making WF not scan.
When I use Core Control and look in the logs, it looks like connections to https://api.www.remarpro.com are timing out.
When I ping manually from the server that runs these WP sites, or on my desktop – both in the same network – I get responses. The first response on the server after the DNS lookup seems reasonable (60.2ms) The second response takes longer (320ms) and the others are somewhere in between. Dig works fine and returns 4 possible IP addresses.
In CC in the Filesystem Access section, the only transport not available is SSH2. In the External HTTP access section, cURL is currently enabled and testing the transport indicates that it’s working – I’ve tried with it both enabled and disabled – no noticeable change.
I’ve also played with the version of PHP/CGI available. PHP-FPM (default), Fast-CGI and CGI all give the same result.
All of this has the unfortunate result of making me not work on / take care of the site. The front end is a little slow – seems a 5 second delay consistently when first loading the site, but page clicks are OK as long as a long delay between the clicks doesn’t happen. Almost like something is needing to “wakeup” if left too long between clicks.
The only possible work around I can come up with is threefold:
1. change the timeout length – in hopes of letting checks for plug-ins and WP updates to succeed,
2. disable cURL – some people especially if they’re having trouble with that secure connection to WP have luck with this, and
3. set WP_HTTP_BLOCK_EXTERNAL in the hopes of speeding up the back-end.It seems though that I shouldn’t have to do all of this to an install that used to run just fine on another server. Not to mention I don’t know the full ramifications of what else it would affect. I’d rather just find the configuration problem.
Any suggestions are extremely welcome! I’m tearing my hair out at this point.
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