Wordfence plugin suddenly disappears

Hi, same problem for me.

I was able to restore a backup of the day before, with the database. Wordfence works again on the previous version. I hesitate to update again because of this.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by benber.

Hi @wp-opti, thanks for getting in touch.

Most likely it’s a problem we occasionally see where updates occasionally break on some managed hosting platforms.

The issue is that they tend to use a networked file system that can be extremely slow under load, though usually not from the site itself but from other sites using the same file system. Additionally some cpanel accounts are similarly limited in file transfer, but that’s largely artificially limited to prevent it from impacting other accounts using managed WordPress.

The update process involves removing old files, unzipping the new plugin, and then copying over the new files to the plugin location. That can easily exceed the 30 second max_execution time or even the 60 second gateway timeout which can’t be increased in the local .user.ini file. It’s usually during the last part of the transfer when the new files are copied. If the file transfer dies when the files are halfway through being copied you can see some very odd effects, but what usually happens is the update fails.

It’s also possible MainWP updates in a way that doesn’t retry if an update fails and continues with the next site if you’re updating in bulk, but I’m not experienced with using it so that’s just speculation.

Thanks,

Peter.

Hello Peter,

I think it has nothing to do with my hosting platform. I already asked them about this issue and they explained to me it was nothing on their end.

It also has nothing to do with MainWP, because as I already said the problem occurred for the very first time in years, after I enabled the option in the Wordfence plugin settings to automatically install Wordfence plugin updates.

So it was Wordfence itself, automatically installing the latest update, that seems to caused this issue.

I came into a site and the whole things was down with errors all over the place mainly Jetpack seemed to be the issue.

Got that fixeed. Wordfence is installed on a site, but not working. It does not show up in my list of plugins, but it is there in the plugins folder.

Can I just delete it out of the plugins folder without causing any issues and FTP it back up?

What about the file that loads up when Wordfence is installed after activation – to secure the site a file is rewritten and we download a copy? Just don’t worry about it?

Do I need to delete OR replace it with the copy of the htaccess security file?

• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by exdesign.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by exdesign.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by exdesign.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by exdesign.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by exdesign.

Thanks for the update @wp-opti,

Wordfence doesn’t perform its own update as such – even though there is an option inside the plugin to auto-update as well as the WordPress plugins page. Both methods make use of WordPress’s upgrader though, so functionally they are almost the same. For that reason, I was just looking for what factors (WordPress itself, hosting/filesystem, database availability, bulk update plugin) could have temporarily stopped or had an error that resulted in a failed plugin update.

We may have to chalk it up to ‘one of those things’ especially as I’m happy to see it’s an anomoly. There could be clues in your PHP/server logs showing fatal errors or timeouts during the update that could point to a possible cause, but it’s not imperative that you investigate unless it starts happening regularly.

Thanks again,

Peter.