Not possible to have an informed discussion about memory usage?

  • Years ago I set up a site for a Club I belong to; I picked WordPress and went ahead and built a small site; it has a few dozen visitors a week; mostly it is an recruitment and contact/route guide for the club; and a place to dump odd photos and stories from members.

    We have limited funds; whatever we do has to be cheap.

    And now; wordpress will no longer run in the memory allocation we pay for; we can pay for more; or we can incur one-time charges and go to another provider; except that they all charge approximately the same. in summary: we cant get 64Mb hosting without doubling our costs.

    I came here looking for some workarounds; maybe a few neat tricks, or a ‘wait for release 2.x.0; we’re going to properly allocate only memory we need then..’ etc..

    What I found is a an attempt to shoot the messenger; all threads are rapidly filled with non-viable solutions and criticisms of the posters and their hosting choices; and then closed to further comments to prevent the obvious withering replies.

    This is a shame; it’s sad to see an open source project going the Commercial path of bloat, indifference, transparent attempts to control the agenda and public denial of problems.

    The better solution is to do a proper audit of memory allocation in the WordPress core and pare it down to the minimum necessary. People will still have problems with poor plugins; but these can be disabled and addressed through their developers, or abandoned, whereas the WP core cannot.

    To put it in perspective: If I tar up (make an uncompressed archive of) my entire WP install, including 11 Db backups and the uploads folder, it is smaller than the memory footprint of that same install while running with all plugins disabled.

    My solution is to revert to 2.7.1 and start looking for a WP replacement with a future.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    I have found that all of my WP blogs run consistently between 18 and 25mb, depending on specific plugin activity. Usually these cases are either the result of a greedy plugin or another script on the hosting account (another site, stats software, etc) hogging the majority of the memory. Most shared hosting providers cap available memory at 32mb, so I think this would be a far more wide-spread issue if it were a problem with the core.

    Are you absolutely sure that it’s just the WordPress core, with absolutely no plugins and no other scripts running on the hosting account, that’s putting you over 64mb?

    I’d be very surprised if it is core, because there was a specific trac ticket to reduce the size of 3.0 so that it fits under 32MB.

    Moderator Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

    (@ipstenu)

    ?????? Advisor and Activist

    You may also want to check into caching plugins. They can reduce your memory, somewhat. I’m honestly surprised as well, since I’ve had more issues with CPU than memory for my WP installs.

    I found this helpful blog post about how to help reduce your memory usage: https://www.wpbuster.com/hosting/how-to-reduce-wordpresss-server-load-on-shared-hosting/

    Also remember – Sometimes just turning off a plugin doesn’t kill it. Delete the plugin folders.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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