Wordfence Crashes Server?

  • Resolved alexukie

    (@alexukie)


    5 years, 1 month ago

    So I am not 100% sure if Wordfence is the 100% cause – but every time a DDOS happens or I imitate a DDOS with https://pentest-tools.com – our whole server goes down.. just hangs in there or it says that maximum connections reached or Error establishing a database connection..

    Our environment: Centos 7, CPU Intel? Xeon? E3-1230V2 – 4 Cores – 3.3GHz – H/T – Included, RAM RAM 8GB – Included..

    When I restart the server – all goes back to normal..

    This now happens every day or so… we never had similar issues before wordfence install.

    Any idea on possible causes of server crash? Should not server / sql / apache / httpd / wordfence be able to handle hundreds or even thousand concurrent requests? Because this is getting ridiculous physically restarting server every day…

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Hey @alexukie,

    Are you able to share your PHP error logs? This might give us a clue as to exactly what’s happening.

    What’s your PHP memory and max execution time set at? It sounds like the site experiences a heavy attack, runs out of memory and crashes. You might try upping the resources to see if it helps.

    Thanks,

    Gerroald

    Thread Starter alexukie

    (@alexukie)

    Thanks for your reply..

    We have max_execution_time = 30 and memory_limit = 516M..

    When DDOS (or imitated DDOS) happens to one website – the whole server crashes (we have 4 websites on it now)..

    1 Thing I think might be causing an issue is that we still run php 5.6 and mysql 5.6 as we have one website that does not support php 7..

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 1 month ago by alexukie.

    Hey @alexukie,

    Every site is different, but I would think 516M should be enough memory to avoid resource issues. Can you try disabling Wordfence then run the pentest to see if it still crashes? I know purposefully crashing the site isn’t ideal, but it will let us know if Wordfence is contributing to it or not.

    Please let me know.

    Thanks,

    Gerroald

    Thread Starter alexukie

    (@alexukie)

    We have implemented / updated local on server level firewall – and server crashes went away for now. I think hitting php / mysql directly 1000 times – the server just goes down.. Will update if it comes back..

    Hey @alexukie,

    Thanks for the update, and please do let us know how it goes.

    Thanks,

    Gerroald

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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