Title: Wordfence abusing server limits
Last modified: August 30, 2016

---

# Wordfence abusing server limits

 *  Resolved [Reelicon](https://wordpress.org/support/users/reelicon/)
 * (@reelicon)
 * [10 years, 8 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/wordfence-abusing-server-limits/)
 * I’ve been a long time Wordfence user and this is the first serious incident I
   had with my host and my account being restricted.
 * I disabled the plugin temporarily till I resolve the issue related to multiple
   instances of:
    192.254.189.214 getalens.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=wordfence_doScan&
   isFork=1&c
 * CPU Usage: 105.3% (warning)
    Diskspace: 90894 MiB (warning) Inodes: 468761 (warning)
 * Your help would be much appreciated
 * [https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordfence/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordfence/)

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

 *  Plugin Author [WFMattR](https://wordpress.org/support/users/wfmattr/)
 * (@wfmattr)
 * [10 years, 8 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/wordfence-abusing-server-limits/#post-6657599)
 * Can you post which options you have enabled under the “Scans to Include” section
   of the Wordfence Options page?
 * You will need to temporarily activate the plugin again. If an automatic scan 
   begins when you activate it, you can go to the Scan page and click the link to
   kill the scan, below the “Start a Wordfence Scan” button.
 * If you have “Scan images and binary files as if they were executable” enabled,
   or High Sensitivity scanning, you could disable those to make the scans shorter.
   These options are off by default in new installations.
 * If you have a very large number of pages or posts and have Falcon or Basic caching
   enabled, the disk space and number of inodes could also be high because of that,
   though this could happen with any plugin that does page caching. Are you using
   Wordfence’s caching, or any other caching plugin?
 * Usually the scan should only have one instance of the “wordfence_doScan” process
   running at any time, and a second one may overlap for a short period, since scanning
   is broken up into multiple processes due to time limits. One of the processes
   will start another one, and then it will end itself shortly afterward — so there
   shouldn’t be a lot of these running, but they can run for a long time depending
   on the site’s content.
 * Did the host say how long the processes were running?
 * -Matt R
 *  Thread Starter [Reelicon](https://wordpress.org/support/users/reelicon/)
 * (@reelicon)
 * [10 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/wordfence-abusing-server-limits/#post-6657727)
 * Sorry for the delay in replying Matt, and thanks for the suggestions.
 * I was having a hard time communicating with my host support and re-bringing back
   life to my site, which remained down for 48 hrs. almost because of this issue.
   They were not co-operative at all actually.
 * To answer to your inquiries;
 * “Scan images and binary files as if they were executable” enabled, or High Sensitivity
   scanning = they’re off
 * Falcon caching = not enabled. I activated it in the past to test, then turned
   it off to avoid this same situation
 * What I did for now is:
 * 1- I stopped live scan which I had turned off the button for already previously
   but apparently there’s another “Enable Live Traffic View”in basic options that
   was ticked and I had to remove.
 * 2- I stopped automatic scheduled scans
 * 3-I reduced Wordfence memory request when scanning from 256 to 48
 * I will keep an eye this way for now. I hope I wont have further issues
 *  Plugin Author [WFMattR](https://wordpress.org/support/users/wfmattr/)
 * (@wfmattr)
 * [10 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/wordfence-abusing-server-limits/#post-6657731)
 * Ok, sorry to hear the host wasn’t cooperative. Some hosts are more helpful in
   troubleshooting performance issues.
 * Disabling the Live Traffic view can have a benefit — it’s unusual that you had
   to turn it off twice. If any other options seem to have trouble saving, you can
   also turn on “Disable config caching” on the Wordfence Options page.
 * Since you stopped the scheduled scans, that should fix the original issue with
   the “wordfence_doScan” processes the host originally mentioned, but of course,
   files won’t be scanned for malicious content unfortunately, but will still have
   the other benefits. If you do run manual scans, you could try turning off most
   of the scan options, and run only a few of them at a time, then do a scan with
   different options later, to keep resource usage lower. (I’m not sure if this 
   will help enough for the host’s rules though.)
 * If you do have further trouble, feel free to reopen this request. Thanks!
 * -Matt R

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

The topic ‘Wordfence abusing server limits’ is closed to new replies.

 * ![](https://ps.w.org/wordfence/assets/icon.svg?rev=2070865)
 * [Wordfence Security - Firewall, Malware Scan, and Login Security](https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordfence/)
 * [Frequently Asked Questions](https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordfence/#faq)
 * [Support Threads](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/wordfence/)
 * [Active Topics](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/wordfence/active/)
 * [Unresolved Topics](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/wordfence/unresolved/)
 * [Reviews](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/wordfence/reviews/)

## Tags

 * [limits](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/limits/)
 * [server](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/server/)

 * 3 replies
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [WFMattR](https://wordpress.org/support/users/wfmattr/)
 * Last activity: [10 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/wordfence-abusing-server-limits/#post-6657731)
 * Status: resolved