Experienced major outages a few days ago with perpetual 500 errors. Host is HostPapa. It's a small site. Single WordPress install. Minimal plugins. No eCommerce or similar. Low site visits.
Nothing had changed on the site. No new plugins. I'd enabled a web cache and took other measures to reduce server impact.
At times during the crashes we had 5MB memory allocation.
WordFence and same + more plugins installed on other sites with other hosts and no issues at all.
Now HostPapa seem to be "blaming" WordFence for the crashes. They have supplied the logs below which are for a period after the site crashes.
"
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[Thu Mar 27 14:12:31 2014] [error] [client 74.112.131.243] (12)Cannot allocate
memory: couldn't create child process: /opt/suphp/sbin/suphp for /home/thmce786/public_html/index.php
[Thu Mar 27 22:10:06 2014] [error] [client 69.28.199.90] (12)Cannot allocate
memory: couldn't create child process: /opt/suphp/sbin/suphp for /home/thmce786/public_html/wp-cron.php
[Thu Mar 27 22:10:06 2014] [error] [client 69.28.199.90] (12)Cannot allocate
memory: couldn't create child process: /opt/suphp/sbin/suphp for /home/thmce786/public_html/wp-cron.php
[Thu Mar 27 22:10:08 2014] [error] [client 58.167.84.16] (12)Cannot allocate
memory: couldn't create child process: /opt/suphp/sbin/suphp for /home/thmce786/public_html/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php, referer:
http://thmcec.org.au/wp-admin/admin.php?page=WordfenceActivity
"
Have suggested we optimise scripts when we have taken all steps to reduce server load and optimise everything for a site that shouldn't need it.
Should I disable scheduled scans just to satisfy these fools?