[April 6th] Wordfence 5 and Falcon Engine Announcement

Nice addition. For the first few minutes I thought ‘What’s this Falcon Engine all about?’ and searched to see whether it is a new framework similar to Phalcon but for WP. Then I realised: it is a caching option in Wordfence.

Testing Falcon in one of my more active sites where Quick Cache was in use prior to Falcon (today (only Falcon is in use now)). Seems good so far. Both plugins provide comparable performace boosts in the limited tests I ran.

Thank you for this new adition.

All my Live Traffic history is gone after the update. A warning about that would be nice.

Seedy, what happens when you disable Falcon Engine? Do your stats become visible again?

Enabling Falcon disables Live Traffic Logging so wondering whether the stats might still be in your database but just not accessible while Falcon is enabled.

Cons:
* can’t set expiration time for cache
* can’t choose cache clear events. I dislike when I need to update or uninstall a plugin, or add a new tag to an article, and the cache clears automatically. Cheap hosting, for some installations it takes time to rebuild cache, and I need a lot of editing and testing.
* can’t disallow (or allow) a client side cache, the same for logged in users.

It’s still not clear to me if this caching works ok with user agent strings (iPhone, Ipad and so on). I use Weaver theme and it delevers 4 versions of the site.

Pros
I have the cheapest hosting service and caching job consume very few resources so far, even if it handles gzip versions for cache. Quick cache doesn’t care about gzip.
Thank you for this addition ??

Hi Guys,

Yes your stats didn’t go anywhere. They’re still in the DB and will reappear when you disable Falcon. You can enable PHP caching which will triple your performance and you’ll still be able to have live traffic if you’d like.

You can also switch Falcon on and off as you please and you won’t lose any data.

Regards,

Mark.

Hi Alergic:

Thanks for the feedback. Good point regarding sites that serve different versions depending on UA string. We will be adding UA exclusions but that won’t elegantly deal with sites that use server-side UA detection to serve up different content. So will give that some thought and welcome your feedback.

Regards,

Mark.

A great way to improve the plugin!

Cons:
– scan still not working on LiteSpeed servers
– probably the same server configuration conflicts with the debugging html line in the pages, so you don’t see the queries.

Some caching is stull available though with Falcon engine enabled.

Will falcon engine work on nginx sites using php-FPM or only apache servers?

same question as coreya and I also use ngx_pagespeed + fastcgi_cache. If a request passes those two there is mysql query cache+ + APC + WP Object cache using APC to catch the rest so I don’t think Falcon will fit into the mix but just to give it a try, care to share the nginx equivalent of the .htaccess Falcon generates?

I do like the caching feature but I’d have preferred to see it as a separate plugin.

Hi! Falcon caching doesn’t work for me. The homepage loads, but all articles are “file not found”. On activating, my whole .htaccess gets replaced – including the rewrite rules:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Could that be the problem?

Regards,
Rolf

Updated to WF v 5.01. After installation, but before I could even look at WF options, I lost access to all currently installed plugins and to the WP updates pages. I Moved the WF folder to my machine and deleted it from the plugins folder, no change. Any help would be very much appreciated! Thanks!

How well if at all does Falcon work with Varnish?

Hi All,

If you’re currently having an issue please start a separate thread or it’s going to be impossible for me to differentiate conversations.

Wordfence 5.0.2 has just been released which fixes two issues that users reported. One of them is the is_404() warning that some users received who are running their sites in debug mode. Looks like some hosting providers don’t give you control over whether your site is in debug mode or not.

The other issue is a warning about being unable to get the currently logged in user id.

See the changelog for the rest.

Falcon should work fine with sites that have a front-end cache like Varnish although we haven’t tested it.

If you’re using Nginx as a front-end proxy then Falcon works beautifully – I use this config on my own site.

If you’re hoping for rewrite rules for Nginx itself that will cause it to directly serve up the cached pages, those are forthcoming. If one of our users wants to put that together based on our current .htaccess rules I’d love to see it. Be warned that you need to deal with sites in subdirectories so check out the code in Wordfence that actually generates the htaccess file for details.

Regards,

Mark.

Looks promising,

Will definately keep an eye out there for the Nginx posts… running { nginx, php-farm, FastCgiCache, Opcache & apcu} with W3 Total cache & varnish and might want to switch W3 TOtal cache ; )

or keep it just for the cdn functionality if Falcon proves faster!