Log table brought my server to its knees for 24 hours

  • Hi I just wanted to let you guys know that the plugin caused major issues to my server yesterday. I host around 20 sites, each running iThemes Security, on a server with a large buffer of resources to handle sudden usage spikes. All of the sites started experiencing major timeouts yesterday every few hours where RAM usage would spike and IO operations would pass their allowed threshold. After a lot of digging I found that iThemes Security plugin was the culprit. Every site was attempting to migrate its it_sec_logs table to a new DB format at the same time. Some of these tables were massive because of another bug that you recently fixed that was preventing the table from being cleaned out recently. The mass migration taking place at the long time was taking down the entire server. By manually truncating some of the large tables and kicking off the migration action manually one at a time I was able to resolve the issue. But I hope this feedback helps you the next time you have to execute a migration of a potentially large table.

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  • thanks to iThemes Security we’re all spending much more time in phpmyadmin, emptying itsec_logs table for our websites.

    I just used a database plugin to clean up 2 blogs with IThemes Security whose tables were the biggest they were and I didn’t realize it. itsec_logs had 6559 rows and weighed 71504 KB on one site….and on the other 68127Kb. I don’t understand why they took the button off to delete the logs.

    As of the 6.9.2 release the plugin still includes an automated purge log event in the form of a daily WordPress cron job.

    Use the ‘Days to Keep Database Logs’ setting in the Global Settings module to control the amount of data to be kept. (The default value is 14 days).

    It seems the setting allows you to specify 0 days which should result in an empty log once the purge log event kicks off …

    Not perfect but it should work …

    Don’t forget to reset the ‘Days to Keep Database Logs’ setting afterwards ??

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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