Fairly serious performance issue – auto-loaded options

It looks like this bug still exists. I am running WP 4.0 and the latest version of this plugin, and I found that BruteProtect was keeping almost 45,000 rows in my wp_options table with autoload = ‘yes’. I changed them all to ‘no’ and added the following code to my functions.php file to repair future options immediately after BruteProtect sets them.

function dc_fix_BP_site_transients( $option, $value ) {
	global $wpdb;
	if ( stristr( $option, "_site_transient_brute_loginable_" ) ) {
		$transient_fragment = substr( str_replace( "_site_transient_", "", $option ), 0, 40 );
		$result = $wpdb->query("
			UPDATE {$wpdb->options}
			SET autoload = 'no'
			WHERE option_name LIKE ( '%{$transient_fragment}%' )
		");
		if ( FALSE === $result ) {
			error_log("Error trying to repair site transient {$option}");
		} else {
			//error_log("Successfully repaired site transient {$option}");
		}
	}
}
add_action( 'added_option', 'dc_fix_BP_site_transients', 10, 2 );

I hope this helps someone until there is a better workaround built in to the plugin.

I never got my original approach to work because it looks like using the set_site_transient() function prevents these action hooks from being called, so there is no opportunity to fix the transient right after it’s inserted. So instead I decided to schedule a custom cleanup function every 15 minutes. I had to define a custom cron schedule option in order to do this. Code below:

// define a custom shorter cron interval
function dc_customize_cron_schedules( $schedules ) {
	$schedules['every15'] = array(
		'interval' => 60 * 15,
		'display' => __( 'Every 15 Minutes' )
	);
	return $schedules;
}
add_filter( 'cron_schedules', 'dc_customize_cron_schedules' );

// make sure cron job is set
function dc_setup_cron_schedule() {
	if ( ! wp_next_scheduled( 'dc_cron_every15' ) ) {
		wp_schedule_event( time(), 'every15', 'dc_cron_every15');
	}
}
add_action( 'wp', 'dc_setup_cron_schedule' );

// fix site transients autoload bug for BruteProtect
function dc_cron_fix_BP_site_transients() {
	global $wpdb;
	$result = $wpdb->query("
		UPDATE {$wpdb->options}
		SET autoload = 'no'
		WHERE option_name LIKE ( '%_brute_loginable_%' )
	");
}
add_action( 'dc_cron_every15', 'dc_cron_fix_BP_site_transients' );