wordpress wp_options table growing huge

peterwalkley · 12 May 2016 at 09:37

Bit of a strange one and I don't know wordpress at all so not really sure where to start. My missus has a simple blog hosted using wordpress and in the last couple of days the disk space taken by the wp_options table has grown well over the limit that her hosting package supports.

Yesterday it was 51 Gig - she raised a help ticket with her provider (siteground) and they did something that shrunk it down to a more realistic 3 Meg. This morning she's had another over limit alert email come in and its 16 Gig - in less than 12 hours.

It does smell like a bug or some kind of hack / script issue as there's no way what she does should be doing that.

All I found via googling was stuff related to transient entries and we installed a transients cleaning plugin, but that has not had any noticeable effect. My google-fu could be poor here as I don't know the terminology to use, so am getting lots of clearly irrelevant hits back.

She's on the latest wordpress 4.5.2 version. It was upgraded automatically at the weekend for a security update - which makes me semi-suspicious its a bug there, or it could just be coincidence.

I know people here are experienced in this area. Any guidance appreciated.

EDIT: The "something" the provider is doing is this SQL:

OPTIMIZE TABLE `wp_commentmeta`, `wp_comments`, `wp_links`, `wp_mbdb_books`, `wp_options`, `wp_postmeta`, `wp_posts`, `wp_termmeta`, `wp_terms`, `wp_term_relationships`, `wp_term_taxonomy`, `wp_usermeta`, `wp_users`

FrenchTart · 12 May 2016 at 10:02

Have you looked at the table to see what kind of entries are getting spammed?

My guess would be that a rogue plugin is generating a ton of data.

peterwalkley · 12 May 2016 at 10:21

I'll check that and see if I can find anything. The issue doesn't seem to be a large number of rows because even when it has grown huge there's only 300 or so, the optimize table command is just there to tidy the filestore allocation, it doesn't change the DB contents at all.

Something seems to be generating a lot of churn in that table causing it to balloon in size

alexx · 12 May 2016 at 21:43

just in a crude way i would take a db dump and then again once its grown and just do a diff program to see whats being created in there quickly

peterwalkley · 13 May 2016 at 14:32

Small update:

From comparing row differences it looks like some script kiddie is posting a lot of spam by scraping wordpress development articles and posting them. This spam is being automatically detected and cleaned by a plugin she's got installed (akismet), but the battle was resulting in a lot of churn on the DB. That's my best guess anyway.

No issue for a day now. She changed her post settings so any new posters have to be moderated. Not sure if that solved it, or the scrote has gone off to try and spam elsewhere.

If it comes back I guess we'll have to try and find out how to IP ban them. I learned more than I care to of wordpress last night.

Etheco · 13 May 2016 at 15:24

If it is comment spam, You could use something like https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-recaptcha/ and prevent the comment even being posted in the first place.

Worth adding captcha's to most areas anyway, and Re-Captcha is rather nice compared to older ways.