Issue with Shield Security and site response times

[ozfiddler]

@Paul and anyone else using Shield… I have just had a fun few hours trying to troubleshoot a problem affecting many of my sites. I was getting a marked slow down in response time… GTmetrix showed it as a 2 second wait before anything was returned from the server. I had the hosting company investigating, and it seemed to be kicking in on various sites at different times, starting last night.

I finally had the idea to deactivate Shield and that fixed it - load time went from 2.6s down to 0.6 seconds where it should be. So it is something in the latest version (8.5.0) - Shield was auto-updating so it was hitting my sites at different times.

You might want to look into this Paul. Let me know if you need any more details from me.

[ozfiddler]

This is how it looked on the waterfall chart. Sites were typically “waiting” for about 2 seconds.

[Paul]

Sorry to hear about this… Would you be open to providing access to one of the affected sites so we can isolate the issue? If so could drop us a quick email via this form so I have a contact for you and we can take it from there?

Full Support for Shield Plugin For WordPress | Shield Security

Thanks!

[ozfiddler]

Err, no that doesn’t work. I have to search the library and then it says I need a licence key.

Edit. Sent you a PM @Paul

[Paul]

Thanks for your help @ozfiddler! Found the problem, and just released a fix, 8.5.1
Really appreciate the early notice on this, and the coooperation to help find the bug, as we couldn’t replicate it here reliably.
Cheers!

[ozfiddler]

That’s great news. Glad I could help. Certainly looks back to normal…