wfasa

I contacted them via the contact form on their website, it was the only point of contact I could find that did not require login. This was on Oct 11th.

The scan is not one process. The scan spawns new processes at the interval set in “Maximum execution time for each scan stage”. Wordfence defaults to using half of PHPs max execution time. Normally, PHPs max execution time would be set to something like 30 which means Wordfence scan processes would run for 15 seconds. Heart has set this option to 180 which means they have increased the time each individual scan process will run, rather than decrease it. To reduce resource usage, this option should be set lower, and the option to “Use low resource scanning” should be enabled.

We saw that a couple of Heart sites had PHPs max execution time set to 180. I wonder if this could have been the actual problem to begin with? It would have caused the Wordfence scan processes to run for 90 seconds, which is a bit much.

I agree that disable scanning outside your WordPress installation and disable “Scan images, binary, and other files as if they were executable” can also reduce resource usage. If the “Time limit that a scan can run in seconds” is set to 3 minutes you will not be able to complete a scan on most sites though, regardless.

Thanks for your help cucocreative. Hoping to hear from them! Would be better to have this conversation directly.

Hi @artemlatenkov07,

I’m sorry but I still don’t know why this would be happening. In your first screenshot there is a syntax error mentioned on “load scripts”. It’s possible that another plugin is causing an error of some sort, which causes some functions to not load properly.

If you try deactivating all plugins except Wordfence, does Live Traffic display then?

Hi @michelandre,
Just wanted to verify something. Is it correct that the only place you saw the “wrong” value was in the window that opens when you clicked “Click here to display your system information”? That window just shows a phpinfo() printout, which is the settings as defined in your php.ini and that is not something Wordfence controls.

If so, that’s not a bug. Just wondering if you had any actual problems with the configuration?

Hi @maxmulf,
You need to delete the “wordfence” folder located in wp-content/plugins via FTP or any file browser you have via your web host. Then you can install Wordfence again. It will then be version 7.1.15 which does not have the above issue.

Thanks @cucocreative,

Heart sets the scan time limit to 3 minutes. The time it takes for a scan to complete does depend on how many files you have, but it also depends on the servers performance. I don’t think it’s very likely that you’d be able to get a basic scan to complete in 3 minutes on most shared hosting, even if you delete lots of files. A small WordPress site on shared hosting would normally take around 5-15 minutes to scan with the “basic” scan type.

We haven’t changed anything in the scan recently and you don’t need a VPS to run Wordfence. It’s installed on 2 million sites out there and the majority are on shared hosting plans.

I’ve tried reaching out to Heart myself but haven’t heard back unfortunately. If you chat to them again, feel free to encourage them to contact me at asa@wordfence.com.

Hi again,
Basic scans can complete within 3 minutes on some sites, but a more normal time would be somewhere around 10-15 minutes. How long the scan runs will not only depend on which scan options are enabled but also how fast your server is and how many files you have. Therefore I can’t tell you what will work on your site. You’d have to experiment.

The problem is that your host resets the settings automatically so even if you managed to perform a scan once with some settings, you’d have to change the settings every day before you run a scan because they’ve been reset by your host.

The settings I’ve seen from customers that Heart seem to be setting are

Time limit that a scan can run in seconds 180
Maximum execution time for each scan stage 180

To get a “basic” scan to complete on normal shared hosting these options should be

Time limit that a scan can run in seconds 0
Maximum execution time for each scan stage 15

You could opt to only run “limited” scans instead of basic scans. Limited scan should complete within 3 minutes. But it might still not work if “Maximum execution time for each scan stage” is set to 180 because that’s too long. And limited scan does not scan the files in your system, so it provides very limited detection capabilities. If you can get limited scans to work, that might still be an option though as you’d then still have benefit from the Wordfence Firewall and all blocking features, even if the Wordfence scan isn’t doing as much as it could.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 7 months ago by wfasa.

Hi there,
sorry for not responding sooner. We know at this point that Heart/123-reg are intentionally setting Wordfence scan options automatically to settings that makes the scan break. They set the time limit for scans to 180 seconds which means that all scans on these hosts will stop after 3 minutes, whether they are completed or not. I’ve tried reaching out to them but not heard back. To proceed with this issue you need to reach out to Heart/123-reg and ask them to either stop setting Wordfence scan options, or to set them to something that works.