BBQ Firewall Doesn’t Provide Better Performance in Exchange for Poor Protection
About a month ago we discussed why the WordPress security plugin BBQ Firewall wasn’t, as claimed by the developer, a “strong firewall” and In the most recent run of our automated testing of WordPress firewall plugins, we found that it only provides protection against 5 percent of the items tested. So you are not getting much protection from the plugin, but what led us to taking a closer look at the plugin last month was someone mentioning they used it because it is “fast and lightweight”, which is a claim that the developer also makes:
Lightweight, fast and flexible
We have done some testing and didn’t find that it is much lighter or faster than our new Plugin Vulnerabilities Firewall plugin, despite the large gap in protection provided.
Yesterday we noted that the Wordfence Security plugin more than doubles peak memory usage over WordPress itself, which is significantly higher than our plugin. So how does BBQ Firewall compare? Here are the results for that plugin, our plugin, and a control of just WordPress:
- Control: 2943984 Bytes (2.94 MB)
- BBQ Firewall: 2945616 Bytes (2.95 MB)
- Plugin Vulnerabilities Firewall: 2996040 Bytes (3.00 MB)
As you can see, it doesn’t increase memory usage over WordPress by much, but our plugin only raised it another .05 MB.
We also have done testing to see what the performance penalty is caused by firewall plugins that provide at least a reasonable amount of protection. We haven’t included BBQ firewall because it doesn’t provide much protection, but we just ran one of those tests with to see how it performed.
For the test we requested the home page of a WordPress 5.8.1 install, with no plugins installed for the control and with only the latest version of BBQ firewall and our plugin for the other tests. We did the test from a web server running on a local computer, so there is no network latency involved. We did 10,000 requests each time to try to limit variability in the results, though there is still some.
The result was that both BBQ firewall and our plugin caused a slowdown of 3.5 percent over the control. Again, there doesn’t seem to be a real advantage on the performance side in exchange for less protection.