Wordfence Performance

Hi @galapogos01,

We do have some database query performance enhancements planned for a future release and have recently made a change that saves a large number of UPDATE queries during scans. Even though we don’t know how much CPU or RAM Wordfence will use in every case as it’s often dependent on the amount of plugins, files and content, we do constantly try to make these improvements where possible.

Wordfence itself does not make any SHOW FULL FIELDS queries. The improvement we’re planning will reduce the number of SHOW FULL COLUMNS queries that WordPress itself makes on our tables. It does this due to the binary format we use, which is used to make other parts of the plugin faster by avoiding the conversion of data every time it is fetched.

SHOW FULL FIELDS is an alias for SHOW FULL COLUMNS, so the tool you’re using may have just changed how those queries are labelled. If those types of queries are slow, we have seen some cases where customer databases had too small a table_open_cache configured, but that’s just something to consider in the mean time.

Many thanks,
Peter.

Hey Peter,

Thanks for the detailed reply!

The tool used is the mariadb performance_schema, running on a live site for a few days. You’re right that it appears to be aliasing columns as fields, as the Query Monitor plugin shows that the Wordfence plugin is responsible for all the ‘SHOW FULL COLUMNS’ on wp_wfblocks7.

As it’s the biggest time sink according to the data, any improvements would be great to see! It must also be reproduceable as our site is not that special.

Cheers,
Jason

No worries @galapogos01,

We’ll certainly be looking into it consistently over time, I’m just never able to provide precise delivery of features here on the forums as things in our schedule can change from time-to-time.

I’ve made the team aware of your observations and it’s been noted for further discussion internally on top of the work we already have planned in this area.

Thanks again,
Peter.