Is wordfence cause website 508 Error

Hi @astima, Thank you for reaching out to us.

Most web host accounts have set limits on resources. If this limit is breached, a “508 Resource Limit Is Reached” error is triggered, and your site will be temporarily inaccessible.

256MB is generally what we recommend using, though it is not completely uncommon to need to use 512MB or more for sites running a larger number of plugins. One thing to keep in mind is it is not likely that Wordfence is using all the memory, but rather all the plugins active at any given time, or potentially one or two problematic or conflicting plugins.

One thing to do is to go through all your plugins and make sure you are actually using all of them. Every plugin you have activated uses a part of your available memory, so the more plugins you have active, the more memory your site needs.

Whilst we are constantly working on making the plugin faster, perform better, and use less resources, there are not set amounts of RAM, CPU or database queries that we know Wordfence will definitely require in each use-case or hosting environment. This is also not a widespread problem across our sizeable customer base but does crop up from time to time with certain configurations.

Before making an assessment from my side about what the cause might be, it’d be great if I could grab a copy of your site diagnostics which you can send to [email protected]. You can find the link to do so at the top of the Wordfence Tools > Diagnostics page. Then click on “Send Report by Email”. Please add your forum username where indicated and respond here after you have sent it.

Note: For the fastest response time, please make sure and add any information or questions directly to this topic and not the email address above unless asked.

Thanks,

Mark.

I just sent the report. The only thing that was different on Thursday when the site went down was that we need an announcement as to who was expected for next year and we had more people than usual accessing the site at once. Our host provider helped us troubleshoot the 508 error message. They were the ones that fed the wordfence plug-in is using a lot of (I don’t remember what) and recommended disabling it. Once I did that, about 15 minutes later the site was back up. I left the plug-in disabled for a few days and then reactivated it. There has been no issue since. But there has also not been a spike like there was in the usage of our site.

Last year when we made the announcement, our site went down. I do not know what the issue was then. It seems like whenever we have have a large volume of people accessing the site at once it goes down.

Did I misunderstand the directions? I understand you’re busy, so if you just haven’t had a chance to respond I get it. I just want to make sure you’re not waiting on me.

Hi @astima, Apologies for the delayed response and thank you for sending the diagnostic report.

Everything looks good on the report.

On rare occassions, some Wordfence customers can experience problems at times when intensive processes such as scans are running although shared hosting plans, size of website content, and number of installed plugins tend to be the deciding factors in this as the majority of our ~5m site installations work without issue.

I’d recommend that you check with your hosting provider on what exactly caused the issue so wecan take a look if the issue recurs.

Thanks,

Mark.