Plugin stopped working…

WayneM1
(@waynem1)

10 years, 5 months ago

I’ve been using WPFMP on more than 25 WP installations for the past several months. It has been working great on all of the sites, even sites with infrequent visits.

Now, on one of my sites, it no longer seems to complete the automatic scans. All of my sites are on the same server, and have many of the same plugins. The site where it stopped working is the most elaborate and has the most plugins.

I have the WPFMP plugin set to an hourly interval using the WP cron, and the site gets enough traffic that it should trigger the scan. When I visit the plugin settings page, I can see that the reported “Last Scanned” time is always within the last hour. But, it seems to me that the scan is not really completed, since I am not getting an email from the plugin. I know for sure that files have changed on the server between scan intervals, since I added/deleted files as tests, and the server error logs usually get updated/changed every so often, too.

If I activate a manual scan, it works perfectly and reports the changes in the tests I’ve made.

If I change the settings to use “other cron” and use the special URL with the “sc_wpfmp_key” in a browser, it runs the scan as expected.

I have checked the WP cron events/hooks with another plugin, and the “sc_wpfmp_scan ” hook is scheduled to run hourly.

I have a good number of plugins on this particular site and I have disabled/enabled and tested all of them as best I can for compatibility. I’ll keep plugging away at this and see what I can find…

This issue first came to my attention shortly after updating to WP 3.7.1 from 3.7 – just a coincidence??

Are there any known conflicts with other plugins or server settings?

http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-file-monitor-plus/

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

Thread Starter WayneM1
(@waynem1)

10 years, 5 months ago

A little more information…

This morning I updated one plugin on all my WP sites (using InfinteWP – great plugin btw). Within a few minutes I started receiving WPFMP alert emails detailing the changed/added/removed files for each of my WP sites. After one hour I had received the expected email alert for all but 3 of my sites.

One of the sites that did not report was the one I first noticed this issue on (detailed in the post above). The other two sites are very basic and use many of the same plugins and the same theme I use at all of my sties. I compared the plugins on the three sites with this issue and found no plugins in common which are not found on the sites that WPFMP works on (I was hoping for some kind of clue there).

I did a search of my emails and found that that last time I received a WPFMP alert email from these two sites with the issue was back on October 31, 2013. I don’t know what that means… I did a re-install of the latest WP update to these sites today, and after testing, the issue still persists.

These two sites have the same issues as detailed in the post above:
– Automatic scans do not seem to work.
– Judging by the “last scanned” time, the cron event seems to be triggered.
– Manual scans work as expected.
Thread Starter WayneM1
(@waynem1)

10 years, 4 months ago
I seem to be having this discussion with myself… but, I have some additional information to share.

Looks like I have “fixed” this issue on two of my WP installations. After days and days of research and testing, I believe the issue all comes down to an over taxed wp-cron, and the spawned processes resulting from that.

On my busiest site I have taken the following steps to limit cron:

1. Set up real cron to call wp-cron with “wget” with this code:
```
wget -q -O – http://www.mysite.com/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron >/dev/null 2>&1
```
I have this set to run every 10 minutes. This is a great call as it is quiet and does not fill up your root folder with useless standard out files.

2. Added this code to wp-config.php:
```
define( 'DISABLE_WP_CRON', true );
define( 'WP_CRON_LOCK_TIMEOUT', 300 );
```
The first line disables the default action of wp-cron running on every single page visit to the website.
The second line limits the cron instance to no more than once every 5 minutes.
See this codex link for more info:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php#Disable_Cron_and_Cron_Timeout

Since making these changes, WordPress File Monitor Plus now works as expected on this site.

One of the other sites with this issue gets much less traffic, but it has a lot of large files. On that site I simply added this to the wp-config.php:
```
define( 'WP_CRON_LOCK_TIMEOUT', 600 );
```
This limits the cron instance to no more than once every 10 minutes – more than enough time for WPFMP to do its thing.

I hope this one-way conversation has some information in it that may be helpful to others who may be having trouble getting WPFMP to run on busy and/or file dense websites.

As a side note: It is pretty clear to me after the time I’ve spent looking into this, that the default way WordPress fires off wp-cron on every single page load is a real strain on some systems.
Kimberly
(@kellogg9)

10 years, 3 months ago

Same problem as you…Identical! I have 3 sites but the 2 that it doesnt work on are ones with a lot more plugins. And like you the scan says it did run but yet when i change files to test i never get an email. I hate to use a real cron but it seems taht may be the only choice. I thikn i will set it in the cpanel instead of the way you have it though

Kimberly
(@kellogg9)

10 years, 3 months ago

Just an update… @waynem1, you sir are a GENIUS! I decided to goof around to also see if i could pinpoint the problem after reading your post and you are absolutely right that the way to fix it is precisely how you outlined it above: by turning off wp_cron and using a real cron.

Although it seems no one gives a sh!t what you wrote i thought i’d just say THANK YOU for the great effort and time to post this for future others (like me who popped in) to see. It helped tremendously. I probably would have moved to a different plugin if i didnt see this post 🙂

Cheers!

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

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