Hi @swissspaceboy thanks for your message about this.
I have a few additional questions, just to focus down on the behavior of this after it initially presented itself to you.
- Does it only happen once per site, or are some sites seeing the issue repeatedly?
- What is the timestamp and file size of
wp-content/wflogs/GeoLite2-Country.mmdb?
- What setting do you have for Wordfence > All Options > Activity Report > Enable email summary? If it’s set to once a month, we try to update the country for a full month’s worth of records, which could be proving a high workload for certain hosting configurations or sizeable databases.
The GeoIP database does get regularly updated, but there were no functionality updates to this part of the plugin with 7.5.5. A working theory is that a large number of block records requiring updates in the database coupled with a high max_execution_time value may have been a contributing factor, so I would gladly take a look at a copy of your diagnostic report if you could send one to wftest @ wordfence . com? You can find the link to do so at the top of the Wordfence Tools > Diagnostics page. Then click on “Send Report by Email”. Please add your forum username where indicated and respond here after you have sent it.
Note: For the fastest response time, please make sure and add any information or questions directly to this topic and not the email address above unless asked.
Thanks,
Peter.
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Thanks @pirate727 @ronbi13 @filipr for your input also. It is part of the forum guidelines to address the topic-starter so that issues cropping up can be dealt with on an individual basis.
If you wish to continue monitoring this topic to see if the same explanation and possible solution works for you, that’s perfectly fine as these topics remain searchable into the future to help other customers. However, if you wish to start your own topics, we would also be glad to assist if you also use the instructions above to provide your diagnostics.
Thanks!
Hi Peter,
Thanks for replying.
1. I have 5 websites and all are updated to 7.5.5 but only one site gave me this fatal error.
2. wp-content/wflogs/GeoLite2-Country.mmdb: 16 August, 18h41 (the of the plugin update)
3. Wordfence > All Options > Activity Report > Enable email summary? : once a week
4. diag report is sent to your email
I hope that you can find something.
Many thanks,
Didier.
Hi Peter,
Any update from you on this ticket?
Not critical I guess as it happened only once, but many users seem to experience it, so it would be good to get the root cause of it.
Let us know.
Thanks,
Didier.
Hi @swissspaceboy,
We didn’t receive diagnostic reports from all of the other folks receiving the error but we did receive some. However, from the ones we did see there’s not too much in common between cases. The issue occurred on a number of different hosts with different hosting plans, the same PHP version but different Server API and different MySQL/MariaDB versions too.
There are some WordPress plugins in common such as WooCommerce. There’s a chance there was a conflict with their GeoIP code, but we are still leaning towards the update to the GeoIP database was attempted while it was in use to re-label Live Traffic/block records in your database.
Naturally, let us know if it comes up during or after another Wordfence update in the near future as this may help us prevent it happening again.
Thanks again,
Peter.
Thanks for the analysis report.
I will keep an eye on this the next time that WF is updated.
It would indeed be good to put a mutex in place so that no GeoIP DB access is done from WF while it is updating the IP database. You would be deadlocking yourself 🙂
Many thanks !
Didier.
