Wordfence creates massive database size

  • Resolved petraschier

    (@petraschier)


    3 years ago

    Hi! As I have seen in this forum, the problem I have seems to be quite common, but I didn’t find a solution. I’ve installed the free version of Wordfence just a few days ago and today I got an email from my hosting service that they had to block my database due to too many accesses. Since I don’t use apps that cause these accesses, only Wordfence can be the problem. I called my hosting service’s support and they told me the database was already unblocked but there’s definitely too much data caused by Wordfence. What can I do to “clean” my database and prevent this kind of bloating in the future?

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
  • Plugin Support wfphil

    (@wfphil)

    Hi @petraschier

    We have seen a problem with one of our database tables on an older version of MySQL that has a bug in it.

    To see if thet mught apply to you then I would like to have a look at your Wordfence diagnostics report. Please go to the top of the “Diagnostics” tab on the Wordfence “Tools” page. There will be a “SEND REPORT BY EMAIL” button to send the diagnostics report. Enter wftest [at] wordfence [dot] com as the email and petraschier as the forum username please.

    Once you have emailed me the diagnostics report can you reply here to let me know that it has been sent. This is important in the unlikely event that your installation of WordPress is having an issue with sending mail.

    Thread Starter petraschier

    (@petraschier)

    Thanks! I have just sent the diagnostics report via email. My MYSQL Database is 5.7 and I think I read somewhere, that the problem was with 5.6.

    Plugin Support wfphil

    (@wfphil)

    Hi @petraschier

    Thank you for the report.

    Can you ask your hosting provider for a very precise and detailed description of the problem please and let me know.

    Thread Starter petraschier

    (@petraschier)

    Hi @wfphil,

    I was on the phone with my webhosters support, but they don’t know what the exact problem ist. The email I got was sent automatically by the server system:

    Your MySQL database dbsxxxxxx has been locked because the load as well as the number of accesses are too high and therefore no longer correspond to a standard usage.

    The affected database is located in your contract 1&1 Unlimited Pro xxxxxxxxx.

    Important: Since your database has been locked, read or write access is no longer possible. Applications connected to it can now also no longer access this database.

    We recommend that you do not use your MySQL database for so-called high-load applications (e.g. chat systems, log evaluations, ad clicks, etc.). Also, when programming, please make sure that there is not too much load on the database servers. Use sensible indexes wherever possible.

    Please contact us as soon as you have taken the necessary measures. We will unlock your database as soon as possible.

    +++

    When I called the support, the system had already unlocked the access automatically, so that I had full control over my website again. But looking at my database it’s clear that there must be some kind of problem because it’s suddenly more than two thirds full. I have a writers website with mostly static pages and a blog with texts and pictures. No ad clicks, not chats, no whatsoever. The only new plugin that might have caused the problem is Wordfence.

    Plugin Support wfphil

    (@wfphil)

    Hi @petraschier

    Thank you for the update.

    We don’t see why Wordfence would be the cause.

    Things that might be the cause are:

    1) There is a huge number of cron jobs for the Remove Comment IPs plugin.

    2) There are two tables that are larger than our largest table:

    wp_statistics_visitor: 22 MB

    That appears to be for the WP Statistics plugin and you don’t appear to be using that plugin anymore so you can ask the plugin author if you can safely remove any of their tables.

    wp_wsal_metadata: 57MB

    That appears to be for the WP Activity Log plugin.

    3) We also see that you are using the UpdraftPlus plugin so it’s possible that backing up multiple large tables is causing excess usage. Your posts & postmeta tables are pretty large too, but wouldn’t be practical to clean those up unless there are a lot of old revisions.

    Thread Starter petraschier

    (@petraschier)

    Thank you very much for your help!
    I’ll try to figure out what’s the cause of the problem. Your list of tips is a huge help with that.

    Plugin Support wfphil

    (@wfphil)

    Hi @petraschier

    You’re welcome!

    I’ve worked out what’s causing this

    the wp_{prefix}wfconfig table has name, val pairs

    and it seems that there’s a large binary blob that is stored as name=’wfsd_engine’, on my system it’s 811675 bytes long.

    And it’s frequently appended to this, and it never changes.
    I had 447 identical entries in there, which might be a daily update causing it.

    By the look of the code, it never looks at more than one row when it calls get_ser().

    I deleted 446 of the surplus identical copies of this with no obvious ill-effect

    in my example, it was

    delete from wp_{prefix}_wfconfig where name=’wfsd_engine’
    limit 446

    and it appeared to have no ill-effect, but it doesn’t stop the problem re-occurring.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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