Excessive size increasing of wfConfig table

Hello boryanka,
does the database user that WordPress is running as have full privileges? (DELETE, TRUNCATE etc)? You can verify this on Wordfence “Diagnostics” page.

Yes, my db user has full privileges.

Here is what happened right when I installed the plugin again to check the Diagnostics page:
– no single plugin option could be changed – I wanted to just add my email for alerts and then stop live traffic logging and automated scans, because these are the options that I suspect may be causing this behaviour. I tried to edit this options in the moment I activated the plugin, with no success. What I kept seeing was “Wordfence is working”…
– wfConfig table had started increasing again, 2 minutes after install
– I was unable to stop this by any means, I could not even deactivate the plugin.

I was quite happy with your plugin and I would like to continue using it. Please, help me identify the issue.

Hello again,
well it appears as if your installation instantly gets stuck in a loop trying to save settings for scan scheduling. Why this happens I do not know unfortunately. I have not seen this happen before.

You can send me a diagnostics report and I’ll have a quick look to see if there is anything that looks strange with your system.

Go to Wordfence “Diagnostics” page and at the bottom click the button that says “Send Report by Email”. Change the prefilled address to [email protected] and please provide your username so I know who the mail is coming from.

Can someone tell me if it’s safe to manually use the truncate function in wp_wfconfig? We have the same problem as mentioned in this thread, but in our case the database user didn’t have the correct privileges. We fixed that, but the table is still filled up to the extend where our websites crashes. I would like to know if it’s safe to manually truncate wp_wfconfig.

Thanks, wfasa.

It gets stuck in a loop, yes – not trying to save options, but actually saving them, millions of times.

I just sent you the report by email and mentioned my username, I hope the report will give some insight if this is a bug or server setting issue.

I will be waiting for your reply.
Thanks

Flaxion, you can delete all Wordfence tables and try a fresh reinstall.

boryanka, thanks. I’ll get back to you asap.

Hello boryanka,
I have checked with a couple of our devs now and they had two theories.

1. If you are copying the site between dev and production it is theoretically possible that the dev server could be trying to start scans on the live server or vice versa.

2. A behavior like this could be the result if MySQL’s max_allowed_packet is set very, very low OR if MySQL fails to report max_allowed_packet.

You can check the setting value by running this SQL (in phpMyAdmin or in console): SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'max_allowed_packet';

It might be easiest to just forward this information to your web host and have them confirm or deny the hypothesis.