Site with Wordfence suddenly getting gateway timeout

  • Hi!

    For few weeks I have noticed that few sites with Wordfence installed suddenly are getting Error 504 Gateway timeout.
    Without anyone touching anything on the site.
    At that point site is completely inaccessible. But Wordfence can be disabled by renaming plugin folder. That way the site can be accessed.
    But then Wordfence can’t be activated anymore. It just hangs and timeouts.
    The solution is to delete wp-content/wflogs folder. Then everything start to work again.

    Apparently something is getting updated in this folder automatically and for some reason it’s not working right.
    The saddest thing is that the site goes completely down, not only Wordfence.

    Can this be somehow debugged and fixed?

    Thanks!

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)

  • Hi,

    I’ve also experienced this problem, website completely locked until you delete the workforce plugin folder.

    Needs to be investigated.

    John C

    Hi @armandsdz,

    Do you notice a change of ownership/permissions on the wflogs folder itself and/or the files it contains before you delete it and after it’s automatically recreated?

    Is there any PHP cron job, configured in your environment, triggering WP-cron?

    Thread Starter Armands

    (@armandsdz)

    Hi!

    Ownership/permissions seam to be the same. But there is indeed some kind of problem with that old wflogs folder because I can’t delete it completely.
    It says “550 Could not delete rules.php: Is a directory”. File ips.php can’t be deleted as well.
    The hosting is Fasthosts with its Cluster Hosting which despite fancy name has some pretty nasty issues. With file operations in particular. File operations are very slow and it seams on that Cluster Hosting they are approaching file management somehow exotically.
    Therefore, this issue could indeed originate from glitch in hosting but perhaps it can be caught by Wordfence, therefore avoiding complete site breakdown.

    Thanks!

    @wfyann me too. I’m localhost – Xampp

    Thread Starter Armands

    (@armandsdz)

    Could it be that this issue originates when some process that deals with files in wflogs folder doesn’t finish the job because it needs more time than PHP max execution time?
    The process perhaps doesn’t do all it needs and files in wflogs become corrupted?

    Just thinking…

    Hi,

    Did you manage to work out what the issue is?

    I seem to be having the exact same problems with 504 Timeout Errors with Wordfence running.

    @joe-bloggs Same here. Only downloaded it a few months back, been working fine until now. A week ago it took down one of my websites and it just took my other one down today!

    wfyann

    (@wfyann)

    Hi @zoegibbs, @joe-bloggs, @levantoan,

    Could you please confirm which hosting provider you’re using?

    zoegibbs

    (@zoegibbs)

    Hi @wfyann, I’m using Fasthosts. Recently upgraded hosting package, not sure if that’s related or not!

    Joe Bloggs

    (@joe-bloggs)

    Hi there,

    I’m with Siteground.

    Hi there

    I am having the same issues with my website. I use fasthosts. I’ve changed the timeout setting as fasthosts claimed it was using more than 60 seconds (The fasthosts limit)

    Any ideas on what we can do as I really like your plugin.

    Regards

    Neil

    Hi there,

    I am having the same issue with my website from yesterday.

    I do not see any change of owner or permissions to wflogs folder. As soon as I activated Wordfence plugin entire site goes down giving 504 error.

    I have tried installing Wordfence Assitant plugin, disabling firewall, removing data etc. But still no luck.

    Any solution would be great helpful to reuse this plugin.

    Thanks,

    @npardoe, @harish516,

    As per the WordPress forum guidelines, please start your own topic so we can further assist you.

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)
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