Wordfence scan running infinitely

  • Resolved mugluck

    (@mugluck)


    8 years, 2 months ago

    Hey guys, I’ve run into a bit of a problem with a site I maintain. I’m not sure if it was the recent update, but partway through this week wordfence has started hitting an infinite loop on scanning. Or I assume it is, because it just keeps going and increasing the number of files and amount of data scanned.
    I think it got up to 30gig at one point before I cancelled it. (about 80,000 files)

    For contrast, our entire server usage, including the test domain and backup files is only 4.65 gig. The website is a fraction of that, with most of the space taken by uploads.

    Up till now Wordfence has been amazing, and continues to make me feel much, much safer than I would otherwise. We’ve had some issues with scanning, but that was due to server resources.

    Oh speaking of, it looks like resource useage has tripled, I’ve been tracking how much a scan takes and where before we’d see about 60 meg of ram useage, now it’s taking 200 meg and absolutely killing our servers 2k IO usage.

    So, what can I do to fix it? What’s new in Wordfence that would cause this?

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • I’m having the same issue. A site with 1.2gig got up to 25gig before I kill it.

    Same here.

    Hi All,
    Our team is looking into this issue. For now, please check the following:
    – Uncheck “Scan images, binary, and other files as if they were executable” from (Wordfence > Options => Scans to include).
    – Exclude any large files in size or folders with large number of files that you are sure they aren’t malicious (like backup files or folders that include cached files in case you are using a caching plugin). For reference, check “Exclude files from scan that match these wildcard patterns“.

    It could also be helpful on some web hosts to try the new “low resource scanning“, it’s right there under (Wordfence > Options => Scans to include).

    Let me know how it goes,
    Thanks.

    • This reply was modified 8 years, 1 month ago by wfalaa.
    Thread Starter mugluck

    (@mugluck)

    Dropping in to confirm I tested with the image scanning turned off and it completed in about twenty seconds. I love that you guys have low resource scanning now, that would have saved our site in earlier configurations a few months ago.

    Thanks for your hard work.

    Thank you @mugluck, it helped.
    I dont know why it reports number of files and size in GB multiple times real situation. And never finish.

    I went via all options to make sure it is not scanning outside WP folder, but problem is of different nature.

    I set the image files to be scanned as recommended and it solved the time-out or infinite loop failure. Scan still took A VERY LONG TIME (over 4 hours) for a VERY SMALL web site (8 simple mostly static pages).

    Last few lines of scan report:
    [Dec 06 01:45:39] Scanned contents of 13079 additional files at 2.09 per second
    [Dec 06 01:45:39] Asking Wordfence to check URL’s against malware list.
    [Dec 06 01:45:39] Checking 1232 host keys against Wordfence scanning servers.
    [Dec 06 01:45:40] Done host key check.
    [Dec 06 01:45:40] Checking 170 URLs from 137 sources.
    [Dec 06 01:45:41] Done URL check.
    [Dec 06 01:45:42] Done file contents scan
    [Dec 06 01:45:43] Examining URLs found in posts we scanned for dangerous websites
    [Dec 06 01:45:43] Checking 14 host keys against Wordfence scanning servers.
    [Dec 06 01:45:44] Done host key check.
    [Dec 06 01:45:44] Done examining URLs
    [Dec 06 01:45:45] Starting password strength check on 2 users.
    [Dec 06 01:45:46] Starting DNS scan for https://www.teqniqal.com
    [Dec 06 01:45:47] Scanning DNS A record for https://www.teqniqal.com
    [Dec 06 01:45:47] Total disk space: 9090.5247GB — Free disk space: 8833.0864GB
    [Dec 06 01:45:47] The disk has 9045080.44 MB space available
    [Dec 06 01:45:50] ——————-
    [Dec 06 01:45:50] Scan Complete. Scanned 16882 files, 13 plugins, 6 themes, 8 pages, 0 comments and 124538 records in 4 hours 3 minutes 51 seconds.
    [Dec 06 01:45:51] Wordfence used 77.09MB of memory for scan. Server peak memory usage was: 153.40MB

    Hi @teqniqal
    If you have “low resource scanning” option enabled at (Wordfence > Options => Scans to include), scans can take much more time than normal, but not 4 hours -specially in your case- so please turn off “low resource scanning” if you have it enabled for now, then run a new scan and when it completes succesfully, please click on “Email activity log” link and enter this email address “alaa [at] wordfence [dot] com”.

    P.S. It’s recommend -as per forums rules- to open a new support thread for your own questions, this will help us answering everyone’s questions easily.

    Thanks.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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