Login on Wordfence Central console spikes CPU on hosting server

  • Resolved grl570810

    (@grl570810)


    1 year, 6 months ago

    Hi Wordfence support,
    Every morning I login to the Wordfence Central console to check the status of the twenty-odd sites I have running Wordfence. As soon as I do that the CPU on my hosting server spikes to 100% and stays that way for some minutes, response time from my sites is poor. During normal running the rest of the day the CPU is running at around 2-5% average with peaks at around 25%.
    It’s clear that as soon as I login Wordfence Central launches immediate inquiries to every one of the listed sites, triggering scans and resulting in the CPU spike. This is not very friendly of it! Please can you adjust the way it works to spread the load such that it launches the query to the sites at, say, 1 minute intervals, which should mitigate the impact.
    Thanks in Advance,
    Graham

    • This topic was modified 1 year, 6 months ago by grl570810. Reason: spell checker bad!
Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Support wfjanet

    (@wfjanet)

    Hi @grl570810,

    Thanks for reaching out.

    Whilst we are constantly working on making the plugin faster, perform better, and use less resources, there are factors that will affect performance such as hosting your site on a shared server. Wordfence’s scan does make a lot of database queries as it runs, but they’re generally simple/fast ones that tend not to cause problems for our users.

    The best ways to make sure performance won’t be a problem are:

    • Ensuring the memory allocated to PHP is sufficient (most hosts set it to 256M).
    • The site isn’t running an excessively high amount of plugins.
    • That you are using PHP 7.4 or above.

    I would also recommend reading our scan troubleshooting guide and system requirements which highlights PHP versions, recommended settings, and troubleshooting memory/CPU issues in more detail.

    You could also try Wordfence > Scan > Manage Scan > Performance Options > Use low resource scanning, along with setting Maximum execution time for each scan stage, found just below to 20 to see if that helps at all.

    Thanks,

    Janet.

    Thread Starter grl570810

    (@grl570810)

    Hi @wfjanet
    Thanks for replying but I am afraid you have completely missed the point of my issue. I have no problem with the performance of the Wordfence plugin on any individual website. My (new) hosting server is blindingly fast in normal usage and initiating a scan on any one website has no performance impact whatsoever.
    My issue is with the Wordfence Central Console (https://www.wordfence.com/central). As I reported, when I login to this at my start of day to check on the status of the sites I host the back-end immediately triggers a scan on every site I have connected to it. It is this approach of running a scan on all my WordPress sites simultaneously that is spiking the hosting server’s CPU usage to 100% and slowing down every site on the server.
    What I am requesting is the the Wordfence Central system be adjusted to issue the requests for a scan to the list of sites in an orderly manner, rather than hitting all the sites at the same instant.
    Regards,
    Graham

    Thread Starter grl570810

    (@grl570810)

    Hi Wordfence Support,
    Bump. Any chance of some feedback regarding my issue?
    Regards,
    Graham

    Plugin Support wfjanet

    (@wfjanet)

    Hi @grl570810,

    Sorry for the delayed response.

    We do have a scan scheduling option which is a premium feature, and we aren’t allowed to discuss those here as per the forum rules.?

    If you have any questions, please contact [email protected].

    Thanks,
    Janet.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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