Wordfence on seperate sites crashes site

  • Hello

    I’m having this problem that when I enable wordfence on completly seperate domains located on the same VPS, it will crash the site that was second to activate the plugin.

    Example
    Step1– domain111.com has wordfence enabled. It’s fine.
    Step2– domain222.com now activates wordfence. It crashes.
    Wordfence is still technically enabled on the crashed site even though I can not access the site.
    Step3– restarting httpd service on the VPS.
    Step4– refreshing the crashed site. It works and has wordfence enabled already.
    Step5– Refresh the first site that was working. It has now crashed.

    My memory limit on php.ini is set to 256MB

    What’s the issue and how can I fix it?

    I already tried:
    – Reinstalling the plugin, including doing a complete manual deletion of plugin folder and plugin database tables.
    – Enabling debug mode on wp-config.php file, but I cant seem to get any output with any of the variables debug, even with this code:

    // Enable WP_DEBUG mode
define('WP_DEBUG', true);

// Enable Debug logging to the /wp-content/debug.log file
define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true);

// Disable display of errors and warnings 
define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false);
@ini_set('display_errors',0);

// Use dev versions of core JS and CSS files (only needed if you are modifying these core files)
define('SCRIPT_DEBUG', true);
    • This topic was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by iraqiboy90.
Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 15 total)
  • Thread Starter iraqiboy90

    (@iraqiboy90)

    Update: Ignore the above combination of variables for the debug mode, I used this and it was working:

    define('WP_DEBUG', true);
define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true);
define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', true);

    It just didnt output anything on that specific crash.

    I also tried increasing memory_limit to 1000M, and it didnt help with the crash.

    I did however narrow it a bit down to:
    – restarting httpd flushes xcache
    So I did only flushing of the cache and it worked just like if I did an httpd restart in the example on the above post at Step3.

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by iraqiboy90.
    • This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by iraqiboy90.
    • This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by iraqiboy90.
    Plugin Author Wordfence Security

    (@mmaunder)

    What do you mean by crash? Does the server segfault? Dod you get a 500 internal server error? A whitescreen?

    Is there anything in the error log if it’s a 500? Or the syslog if it’s a segfault?

    Thanks.

    Thread Starter iraqiboy90

    (@iraqiboy90)

    It’s a 500 error with no error message logged or shown after having wordpress debug enabled

    Site A is running. Then activating wordfence on site B and this is what happens:
    https://i.gyazo.com/4ff0a38ef68c924d35d066931cb4b682.gif

    In order to gain access again, I either disable the plugin by renaming the plugin folder or by restarting httpd or clearing xcache and then refresh Site B, but then site A will crash on refresh

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by iraqiboy90.
    • This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by iraqiboy90.
    Thread Starter iraqiboy90

    (@iraqiboy90)

    and here I tried again by reinstalling wordpress without installing any plugin or themes.
    https://i.gyazo.com/7b902585cd9ff79faae362a67ea4aa6e.gif

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by iraqiboy90.
    Plugin Support wfphil

    (@wfphil)

    Hi @iraqiboy90

    I am following up on behalf of Mark.

    The screen casts show that WordPress has emailed you an error report.

    The email subject field will include Your Site is Experiencing a Technical Issue at the bottom of the email there will be an error report with an error section as follows:

    Error Details
    =============

    What are the reported errors?

    Thread Starter iraqiboy90

    (@iraqiboy90)

    yeah, my postfix/sendmail service isnt working. So there is no email

    Plugin Support wfphil

    (@wfphil)

    Hi @iraqiboy90

    Thank you for the update.

    If you can’t receive those emails and WordPress debugging doesn’t generate a PHP error log file to provide clues then you will need to ask you hosting provider to look at all log files which would include the server operating system log files, web server log files and database server log files to see what is causing the problems on these two sites. If they are not willing to help you then you will need to hire a server engineer to look at this for you.

    Thread Starter iraqiboy90

    (@iraqiboy90)

    I have an unmanaged VPS, so I have full access to it. I did a “tail -f” for all logs at the same time. The only ones that gets new info is the vhost error log that shows me a standard 500 http error code, and the second one shows me that postfix is misconfigured/disabled. This is on porpus because I’m using external mail service. I’m using an SMTP plugin with external mail server for my other wordpress site. I do have it on the new one as well, but the crash message tries to use sendmail (postfix) instead.

    Thread Starter iraqiboy90

    (@iraqiboy90)

    Here is what I tried so far since the beginning.
    I disable the same wordfence feature on both sites, flush the cache from the VPS and then re-activate wordfence on both sites. With each step done, if it wasn’t the culprit, I re-enable the feature again and go to the next feature, doing the same methods again.
    I tried all of them. Nothing helped.

    Though, I found an article that talks about a cookie that wordfence uses for its live traffic feature that messes up the cache which in turn crashes the site. Now, I know this cookie has been removed since 2018 but that’s the closest thing to an answer I got.

    I have one step left to try. I will try to disabled caching on the server and all sites I have on it. When I get time to do it, I will reply here with an answer about it.

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by iraqiboy90.
    Thread Starter iraqiboy90

    (@iraqiboy90)

    Ok. I just got around to test disabling xcache, and it worked.

    Now, I would like to start saying that disabling a feature to fix a problem does not mean that the feature was a problem.

    Let me suggest my theory of the problem:
    Wordpress asks you on installation to choose a prefix for the database tables, in case you are going to install two wordpresses on the same database.
    This problem occurring with xcache could be the same reason. One wordfence is reserving or assigns a “prefix” to the xcache for its data and when the second wordfence tries to do the same, it fails. Now, since all sites shares the same xcache engine/space, then there must be a solution that’s similar to the WordPress database prefix thing.

    Thread Starter iraqiboy90

    (@iraqiboy90)

    I’ve gone ahead and replaced xcache with Zend Opcache + Redis.

    This issue is not solved. Wordfence has compatibility issues with xcache.

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by iraqiboy90.
    Plugin Support wfphil

    (@wfphil)

    Hi @iraqiboy90

    Wordfence is compatible with XCache so it must be your configuration that is at fault in some way.

    Thread Starter iraqiboy90

    (@iraqiboy90)

    Not when two sites has wordfence at the same time.

    Plugin Support wfphil

    (@wfphil)

    Hi @iraqiboy90

    Thank you for the update.

    As mentioned previously Wordfence is compatible with XCache so it must be your configuration that is at fault in some way.

    Thread Starter iraqiboy90

    (@iraqiboy90)

    I got my email server setup and I got a flood of emails, including the emails sent by the error messages mentioned above

    Here is one of them:

    An error of type E_ERROR was caused in line 44 of the file /var/sentora/hostdata/productionscape/public_html/productionscape_com/wp-content/plugins/wordfence./models/common/wfGeoIP2.php. Error message: Class 'GeoIp2\Database\Reader' not found

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 15 total)
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