Is Comet Cache compatible with Wordfence?

[raamdev]

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title: Is Comet Cache compatible with Wordfence?
categories: questions
tags: 
author: raamdev
github-issue: 

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Yes, Comet Cache is compatible with the Wordfence security plugin. Wordfence has its own caching engine built in and it dynamically disables certain Wordfence features that are not cache-compatible.

I reviewed the Wordfence source code and from what I can tell these are the Wordfence features that get disabled when the Wordfence Falcon Engine cache is enabled:

• Live Traffic Monitoring
• Blocking ranges of IP addresses
• Country blocking will only work on the login page and other dynamic pages

Also, from my review of the Wordfence source code, it doesn't look like there is anything in Wordfence that would prevent Comet Cache from working reliably.

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Ross Grant shared a few notes about running Wordfence with the Comet Cache Auto-Cache Engine: https://forums.wpsharks.com/t/cometcache-and-wordfence-might-have-an-issue-with-them/1589/8?u=raamdev

Cometcache is running it's autocache script every 15 minutes to cache pages - crawling one page ever 500 miliseconds by deafult.

I run a large and active site, so the cache is being reset multiple times a day, as new posts and pages are being created.

This means each time AC runs, it's hitting pretty big numbers in terms of page crawls.

Wordfence sees these page crawls as live traffic and starts throwing these 'visits' into the live traffic log - which runs and runs whilst AC is operational.

This is causing lengthy runtimes of WF logging scripts and triggering CPanel to throw the suspicious process emails EVERY 15 minutes.

There is a very simple fix for this, which ALL WF users should implement if running CC and AC together.

Go into the general 'options' of WF and scroll to the 'Live Traffic' section.
You'll see an option labelled 'List of comma separated IP addresses to ignore'

Paste your SERVER'S IP address(s) into that field and save changes.

Next, we want to purge that MASSIVE WF live traffic log, which has been created by the previous crawls.

Edit the 'Amount of Live Traffic data to store (number of rows)' option to 100 and save changes.

This will set up a cron to clear that log, the next time it runs, and reduce its entires to just 100. (default is 2000 rows)

AC can then continue to run, without creating huge logs each time - with all visits from your own server being ignored by WF.