gbeddow

@wfpeter any word on a fix for this? Since it started my site availability according to Site24x7.com has dropped from 100% to less than 15%, so I’m about to pull the plug on Wordfence.

@wfpeter are you sure there isn’t a bug somewhere in Wordfence?

Every time it hangs there’s a timeout error in different places in the Wordfence code – and no errors anywhere else. Here’s another one just as a data point:

[Tue Mar 28 14:38:40.279739 2023] [:error] [pid 23167] [client 192.168.1.1:64292] PHP Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /data/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wordfence/vendor/wordfence/wf-waf/src/lib/parser/lexer.php on line 672

@wfpeter Any other ideas? I tried all those and the site still hangs intermittently for > 30 seconds.

Another idea: Over the past ~6 years I’ve manually blocked a large number of IPs for making failed login attempts, etc. Is it possible Wordfence is slowing down as a result?

@wfpeter any progress on this? Does a fix need to happen in Wordfence, or is there something more I can do on my side?

Possible clue:

# cat /data/logs/bluenote9.com-error.log

…

[Sat Mar 25 07:51:54.039740 2023] [:error] [pid 24744] [client 192.168.1.1:57314] PHP Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /data/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wordfence/vendor/wordfence/wf-waf/src/lib/utils.php on line 479

@wfpeter One unfortunate side-effect of this is that my site is now often very slow. So slow, in fact, I’ve had to temporarily disable Wordfence altogether, not a good state of affairs.

Thanks @wfpeter . Deleting the wflogs folder made the Wordfence error message go away, but manually updating the rules failed because it thought it had exceeded a maximum number of manual updates. Maybe it will start working normally again now, we’ll see.

Great @wpallimport. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but it looks like this is just the ticket! Thanks.

@kpbryce132, Not sure what would solve your particular situation, but if you continue with UpdraftPlus you might see if this link helps:

https://updraftplus.com/faqs/can-i-run-backups-from-the-shell/

I was a developer for over 30 years and know this line of reasoning quite well. Trouble is, logic dictates that if there’s a dependency on an external module (curl) that fails to meet expectations, and the developer and user have little or no control over that module, you need to either remove the dependency or use the module in a way that doesn’t fail to meet the expectation. If they put half as much effort into doing that rather than explaining the problem away, they’d have this fixed long ago.

I switched to another backup plugin 1-1/2 years ago. Didn’t pay a dime for it, and it does everything I want – and probably more.

resolved

Thanks wfmatt for the explanation.

In case this was the cause for other folks, here’s what was triggering this on my server and how I dealt with it:

I found that, even after manually setting the owner of wflogs/config.php to admin (the web server user on my server), every 5 minutes it would get set back to root. That was because, on a low traffic site like mine, the standard wp-cron mechanism which relies on traffic to the site to do its work was simply too unreliable. So a long time ago I turned it off, then created a crontab job (from root) to run wp-cron every 5 minutes. That worked great for the most part, but wp-cron apparently triggers something in Wordfence that writes to wflogs/config.php, in the process changing its owner – in this case back to root. So the solution was to remove wp-cron from crontab, then create a file in /etc/cron.d where you can specify the user. It looks something like this:

# m   h     dom   mon   dow   user    command
*/5   *     *     *     *     admin   cd /ReadyNAS-Volume/public_html/; /usr/bin/php -q /ReadyNAS-Volume/public_html/wp-cron.php >> /ReadyNAS-Volume/rsyslog/wp-cron.log 2>&1

The owner of wflogs/config.php stopped changing, and I was able to configure the Wordfence firewall.

wflogs appears to be a new directory introduced in Wordfence 6.1.1.

That being the case, why is this failing?

I’m trying to be pragmatic here, and not as hesitant as RGrissom when it comes to manually changing file permissions, but some assurances from Wordfence along the lines of what he’s asking seems appropriate in the circumstances.

Why does this newly-introduced directory/file have the “wrong” permissions? Will it be fixed in an update to Wordfence?

Thanks so much!

Rodias: It sounds your situation is a little different so, if you haven’t resolved it, you might try starting a separate support question.