Wordfence Central & Server Load?

  • We have 200+ sites across three cloud servers on SiteGround. We’ve added all of these sites to WF Central. We’ve noticed that logging in and opening WF Central often leads to high server load on our servers. While these servers are stable at other times, simply logging into WF Central can yield gateway 503 errors. Is WF Central set to do a large call of some sort when logging in?

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

  • Hi @bobimg,

    Wordfence central will ping your site at least once, which means if you have ~66 sites hosted on one server (200 / 3), that means you should see ~66 hits to the same server when you login.

    I’d imagine that’s enough to see some spikes in server load, even for a moderately powerful server.

    Can you confirm that this is the case if you look at your server logs?

    Dave

    Thread Starter BobIMG

    (@bobimg)

    Hi Dave,

    I just did an experiment. I opened up a RAM usage graph supplied by SiteGround before logging into WF Central. I focused on our one server that has the most sites (83). These sites get very little traffic. As an illustration, this is how that graph peaked when I logged in: https://take.ms/XhrJt

    For reference, this is what that server’s load has looked like for the past few days: https://take.ms/jGxkf . In other words, this peak is pretty significant and was caused when logging into WF Central. In the first illustration, note how after the peak the server returns to nearly normal levels. I stayed logged into WF Central during most of the duration after the peak on the above graph. While in WF Central I sorted by the “critical” option and then did some minor updates across 10 websites. I also removed a couple of websites that were not connecting and added another site. In other words, it seems to me that things work well with all but the initial login which is adding a significant resource usage.

    As an analogy, I’m thinking about the Windows operating system. A few generations ago, Windows wanted to ensure they could advertise a fast boot time. One way that they achieved this marketing goal was to delay startup apps over the first few minutes while the machine was booting up. This kept the initial load lower and greatly decreased the start up times.

    Can the same kind of principal be applied to WF Central? Maybe batch these initial calls over a longer period of time?

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • The topic ‘Wordfence Central & Server Load?’ is closed to new replies.