Melted server – 4 hrs later found it was this plugin

  • Resolved TartanLad

    (@tartanlad)


    8 years, 5 months ago

    First up I love this plugin and have been using it for almost a year – it’s a lightweight simple plugin that with some CSS styling forms a lovely text-only price chart that I have in my site’s header.

    There have been times when the prices are all at zero – but this usually resolves itself. Not a biggie on a free plugin.

    However today…

    Couldn’t access my site and cloudflare was throwing up 524 errors. Backend was working OK, and other subfolders with different installs of WP were OK.

    Looking at server was getting red across the board for I/O, memory use etc.

    Ran through wordfence as it looked like a DDoS attack, banned a bunch of IPs (there was a small attack going on) and set cloudflare to Under Attack.

    Red alerts persisted in cPanel – which was confusing.

    Worked way through most of the complex plugins and turning them on-off looking for a change.

    Eventually, I spotted in a tab that HAD successfully managed to load the homepage – all the prices were at zero.

    A lightbulb went off and I turned off the plugin that I thought “no way” could be causing the issue.

    With Gold Price turned off – server immediately went back to all-green and cloudflare stopped showing a 524 error.

    Turned on, saw those attack-like symptoms again, turned off it was all great.

    So at the end of the day, it looks like Gold Price can cause serious problems for a server IF it can’t access it’s own prices.

    Like “get thrown off shared hosting” type problems.

    I still love the plugin, but am very wary of it, in case the plugin author doesn’t maintain subscription to her price source.

    To Maeve – I’d happily pay if you can keep this plugin working.

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/gold-price/

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • Plugin Author Maeve Lander

    (@enigmaweb)

    8 years ago

    Hi TartanLad, thanks for reporting this. Sorry I didn’t see this ticket sooner.

    The Gold Price plugin pulls the price data in from an XML feed. I don’t really see how not being able to access that feed URL (or having the feed showing prices as 0 in that feed) could result in any sort of “attack-like” symptoms. It’s also not at all resource intensive to visit an URL to GET XML data.
    I’m not doubting the truth of what you’re saying, just saying I have no clue how or why your server or Cloudflare would have reacted like that to the feed. I’ve not had any other reports of this sort of thing, and my own sites using Gold Price run on Cloudflare too and this doesn’t happen to them.

    I know it’s been ages since you opened this issue (again, sorry about that!) . If you’d still like help investigating further please reply here and I’ll work with you on it. I’m sure we can get to the bottom of it!

    Finally, if you are convinced the issue is related to access to subscription… simply replace my URL with your own, so you are in control of the subscription to the price data.

    Hope that helps 🙂

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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