Wordfence 7.9 conflict with Customize of Astra theme

Hi @francoc30, thanks for your message.

Can I also confirm whether Wordfence was ever run as the only enabled plugin and still caused this message to appear? I wondered if it had been activated after another and was potentially conflicting with that in your initial tests but wanted to clarify.

Are you simultaneously experiencing any red errors in the browser console? If so, what do they say? It may also help us to see your server/PHP log entries from times you’ve attempted to load your site. These will show a much more detailed message about the error that’s occurring than the “friendly” message shown to visitors in the browser.

Thanks,
Peter.

Hi @wfpeter, No I have not tested with only WF being the plugin activated. I only found out WF caused the Customize error when I reactivated my plugins one at a time from the Plugin listing.

The conflict did not affect the frontend which all pages were displayed properly. It only caused the critical error at the backend when the Customize of the theme was clicked. All other plugins opened up with no problem. My php error log has limited capacity. The entries when the error occurred is no longer available. I should have reviewed the error log when that happened.

Addition: I just activated WF then clicked on Customize and view the Browser Developer info: In the Console, the red entry is

GEThttps://ccpst.com/wp-admin/customize.php?return=/wp-admin/plugins.php?plugin_status=all&paged=1&s

From the Network tab, the status is 500 with the following entry: customize.php?return=/wp-admin/plugins.php?plugin_status=all&paged=1&s

Also I check php error log for this particular activation and find this entry:

20230227T123647: ccpst.com/wp-admin/customize.php

mmap() failed: [12] Cannot allocate memory

mmap() failed: [12] Cannot allocate memory
PHP Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 208314368) (tried to allocate 2097152 bytes) in /serverpath/public_html/test/wp-includes/functions.php on line 4247

• This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by francoc30. Reason: Add more information
• This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by francoc30.

Hi @francoc30, we have recently seen another case of the errors you’ve presented above.

The server is running out of memory somewhere outside of PHP and is usually preceded in the error logs by a line like this (and the ones you’ve shown above):

mmap() failed: [12] Cannot allocate memory
PHP Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 133169152) (tried to allocate 49152 bytes) in /xxxxx/wp-includes/class-wpdb.php on line 2153

This is almost always memory exhaustion occurring outside of PHP somewhere on the server. This is usually a job for your hosting company’s support channels as they have access to those logs, can diagnose the source and potentially resolve the problem. It can sometimes be an issue on shared hosting servers where another site is exhausting the memory, so that’s why they would be able to diagnose it as you (and we) don’t have access to the full picture in cases like that.

Let me know how you get on!
Peter.

Hi @wfpeter, The memory on the server is set to the max at 512mb. It is a shared server so the scenario that other sites may impact the memory usage could happen. The hosting support cannot doing anything more, according to them. Though I think there may be a conflict somewhere between Astra Customizer and WF. I am hoping you folks can investigate.

In the meantime, I found a temporary workaround. I deactivate WF whenever I need to use the Customizer, and reactivate it after I am done.