Mark Maunder

Hi,

Please make sure you understand what you’re looking at. We speed up your server by around 30 to 50 times – meaning that the system that takes your database content and turns it into HTML pages and flings it at the user browser becomes very fast. Many benchmarking sites include a bunch of arbitrary stuff like HTML minifying and whether or not you’re using a CDN to determine what your score is. They don’t actually measure performance, they simply are looking for checkboxes. e.g. “Site is using minifying so we’ll add X to their score” rather than measuring it’s tangible impact on the actual load time, which in this case for minification is negligible.

One way to check what Falcon does to your site is to load up the network panel in Chrome debug tools and look at the speed that one of your pages loads before and after you enable Falcon.

Regards,

Mark.

OK will do. Let me know if we can help further.

Regards,

Mark.

Hi Noel,

Yes unfortunately you need to run permalinks to get support for falcon. I would google around because there are plenty of guides on what they are and the advantages in terms of search engine ranking that they provide.

Regards,

Mark.

That is strange. Can you give me an update on what happened when you uploaded the old version? What happens when you try to upgrade now?

Regards,

Mark.

Thanks very much for the feedback.

Regards,

Mark.

OK, you’re going to have to check your web server error log to see what’s going on if you still have a problem. Please also upgrade to version 5.0.2 which may fix this and was released a few minutes ago.

Regards,

Mark.

Wow. OK I’m a little pressed for time, so I’m going to quote your message and try to respond, but it may look a little messy and I apologize for that:

Well, nice copywriting. I know is a new prodcut, but there is almost no FAQ, no extense technical info on how to configure it.

–Yes thats because we just released it. Cut us a little slack here. The product has been available to the general public for about 12 hours, so we really need guidance from the community what the doc needs are. Will be fixing this.

Now to the facts.

Issue 1:
I uninstalled WP Super Cache and enabled Falcon in a test site, and the very first thing I can tell, is that Falcon Engine set to that “30 to 50 Times speed increase” super duper cache mode, is only caching the home page. This is from what I can tell after enabling the debug option and browsing the site all along. Only the homepage source code is showing the cache information, and only the html file for the home page was created inside the wfcache folder. Is it a bug?

–Yes it could be. Please upgrade to 5.0.2 which fixes a bug that caused sites in a subdirectory to not cache pages. Then clear your cache and also disable and reenable caching to be safe. Let me know how this goes and please start a thread for this specific issue if it still exists. I’d like to resolve it for you.

Issue 2:
Also regarding Falcon, what exactly does Falcon with the cache when it is set to “2 to 3 Times speed increase” or “30 to 50 Times speed increase”? Using the first option, I dont see any changes in the .htaccess file. Also, no improvements in browsing speeds. For what I’ve seen, “2 to 3 Times speed increase”=”No performance improvement”. Or is it a bug?

–No it’s not a bug. Basic caching uses PHP to serve up pages that are stored on disk. So PHP, WordPress and Wordfence execute and interrupt execution to serve up a pre-rendered page early in the execution cycle. This provides a nice speed increase without having to edit your .htaccess. Some sites can’t do this which is why we included the feature. If you aren’t seeing a performance gain, my guess is that your site does some heavy lifting early on in the execution cycle and this bottleneck isn’t solved by basic caching. Falcon Engine modifies your .htaccess to have your web server serve pre-rendered pages directly to the user. We use a different directory structure which reduces stat() activity on your server disk and is therefore faster and gets better performance than other caching plugins. Please see http://www.wordfence.com/blog/ for more info on this.

Issue 3:
The IP blocker will block IPs using htaccess, ONLY IF Falcon Engine is active? It’s just a marketing thing? Why can’t it use the htaccess file to set blocked IPs even with Falcon inactive? It’s the scope of a security package to provide the best protection with the best reliability and performance, and until now, I couldnt see cache working. Yet, the htaccess IP blocking works marvelously, and I suggest you to use .htaccess rules to block IPs EVEN WITH FALCON DISABLED. This will improve WordFence for people who dont feel comfy abandoning plugins like W3TC.

–Noted. And no, it’s not a marketing thing.

Issue 4:
I noticed the option to disable XML RPC. Nice. But… how are you disabling it? I didnt see an entry in .htaccess. Are you using the filter? add_filter( ‘xmlrpc_enabled’, ‘__return_false’ );
That’s the recommended way. Please confirm.

–Yes. Line 341 of version 5.0.2.

Issue 5:
One more thing about Falcon. How does it manage ajax, CDNs, browser cache, garbage collection, minification, all the things usually configurable in the major cache systems… The lack of settings options made me uncomfy. And please take in account that I love WordFence very much, I even purchased a license. So, all these annotations are made with love in mind 🙂 Said that, I dont think adding a cache system is a good move. All the major pros using WordFence are already using W3TC too, or even WP Super Cache for humble sites. I’d rather prefer to see a module to integrate WordFence with W3TC, as they provide the options to add compatibility and “team work” between plugins. Trying to replace a good known plugin will make you work hard and lose focus in what you already are doing very well: keep sites secure. Dont try to replace cache plugins, unite. I hope it’s not too late, there are lots of things you can implement to keep sites safer without having to develope a caching feature.

–We made a strategic decision to add performance as a core feature in Wordfence because performance and security are one and the same thing. If your site can handle 800+ requests per second, a DDoS attack becomes almost a moot point, depending on your config. Also please benchmark us against W3TC and WPSC before you pass judgement. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Issue 6:
In despite of the above items, will all these new features have any difference between free version and the licensed one?

–Not at this stage and no current plans. We won’t be doing a bait and switch where we take a currently free feature and make it paid. Our philosophy is to generally charge for features that actually cost us money.

And that’s all by now.
Hope to read soon your answers for every issue. It will clarify lots of things, hopefully 🙂

–No problem. I’d really like to get your support for Falcon and the direction we’re taking. Please be clear: We’re not open to debating whether this feature should or should not be part of Wordfence. We did our research, debated it internally and made the call. If you don’t like it, simply don’t use the feature and use your favorite other-caching plugin. But The performance you’ll get with Falcon will give you a faster site (at least according to our benchmarks) than any other major caching plugin. Features like minification may seem like a good idea, but when you’re already serving up your pages compressed using gzip/deflate, why would you want to remove whitespace from your pages? They already arrive compressed at the client side. Object and database caching may seem like a great idea, but have you benchmarked it? We showed a 10% performance gain with DB caching in a major plugin. It feels good to enable it, but really delivers little gains. What we’ve done here is focus on the really big win which is to serve pre-rendered pages directly from your server’s disk while simultaneously reducing the number of filesystem stats the server has to do. The performance gain you get is unbelievable – it’s around 3000% to 5000%.

That’s all for now. Again, I”m pressed for time and would have liked to share more but I thought you deserved a longer response so I hope that helps.

Regards,

Mark.