Hi @chris30003, thanks for getting in touch!
Wordfence runs well and unintrusively on the vast majority of ~5m sites it’s installed on, so it’d be good if the host could perhaps point to a specific log file, database, or process that it sees as a cause in your case to assist with troubleshooting.
In the mean time, we are constantly working on making the plugin faster, perform better, and use less resources but 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. The cases of slow-down are small in relation to the quantity of customers using Wordfence, but does crop up from time to time with certain configurations or larger databases/number of installed plugins.
For a screenshot of my recommended Performance setting options – Click Here.
You could also set max_execution_time = 60 in php.ini, Wordfence’s scan only ever attempts to use half of this value by default.
Your WP_MEMORY_LIMIT should be set to 128M or 256M in wp-config.php. WooCommerce, for example, recommend 64M minimum, so if you also have many hits on the site at once especially during a Wordfence scan, a lower limit here could be reached fairly easily. Your PHP memory_limit value should be set to 128M or 256M also to accommodate this change otherwise there won’t be enough room for WordPress to use the higher value it is requesting.
Aside from this, if there are any load-balancers or other APIs running on your server such as Litespeed or Cloudflare, you could check if these (or their configuration with Wordfence) are contributing in any way to the slow loading times. Cloudflare for example requires a bespoke Wordfence IP detection option selecting, and whitelisting of your own server’s IP in their settings for scans to run correctly.
Let me know what you find out!
Peter.
