wordpress wp_options table growing huge

[peterwalkley]

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`

 

[peterwalkley]

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

 

[peterwalkley]

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.