I recently bought a shared hosting for couple of my new projects which I will be working on in coming days, just to expand my online base a little bit. Everything seemed to go so well till I was hit with this memory limit issue when I tried to install couple of plugins and wanted to upgrade the wordpress version to latest 3.0.
The error message I got was something like this
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 122880 bytes)
I was like WTF! (Hope it doesn’t come hard on you) so the latest version of wordpress uses that much memory? I tried to contact support from my hosting with the problem. I came up with a reply that the maximum memory limit they would be using on their server is 32M and refused to get the value up as it encourages their customers to abuse their server.
In a way I agree with their response and concern. More than 32M of memory limit usage from a php script is bit too high and anybody with a blog with high traffic would agree with me on this one. So I decided to do a little research on the topic and found out there is a lot of webmasters who are having similar issues with their web server.
What I came to know is something that surprised me, wordpress 3.0 uses four to five times more memory than its previous versions which is wordpress 2.7 and before. Now thats kind of surprising and also a relief for me. So what I did was I deactivated all my plugins and replaced my wordpress files with the older version and gone through the upgrade process, well of course its not really an upgrade its a downgrade process but it went quite well except for a single plugin which doesn’t support wordpress 2.7. But that’s alright I can easily replace it with an alternative.
So now using wordpress 2.7 on my new projects uses way less memory and I have no issues with it. Also the codes are lot cleaner than wordpress 3.0 which makes it a best choice for me. I really think guys who are involved in coding wordpress 3.0 should consider about this memory limit problem and do something about it. Obviously I do not want my blog to consume four times more memory and hit hard on my servers.
Ok if you still decide to stick to wordpress 3.0 for whatever reasons you might have this is all you need to do.
create a file called php.ini in your server root or public_html folder and add this line memory_limit=64M as latest wordpress uses more than 32M I recommend using 64M to go around this issue. If your server doesn’t support over 32M then deactivate all your plugins and replace your wordpress files with wordpres 2.7 except for wp-content folder and wp-config.php file. Go through the upgrade process.
Make sure you have a database backup in case if something goes wrong. I am really thinking about getting this blog to older version of wordpress and I may do it in the coming days. I would make sure to keep you guys informed about it.
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