In Search of a Good Title » WordPress

Wordpress, PHP Memory, and 1and1.com part 2

Curtis M. Humphrey — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:51:38 +0000

It has been some time since the first post on this subject on Mar 4, 2009. I had concluded that the issue was a silent failure (i.e., there is no direct feedback) of not enough PHP memory to run Wordpress with several plugins on 1and1. I like running plugins and therefore this situation was unacceptable. I look around for a new host for around the same price $15 a month (I had the developer package at 1and1). I decided on MediaTemple and there (GS) or grid-service package. I found a coupon and am only paying $16 a month. I am much happier with them as they are a first class hoster. If you are in the same situation I would suggest doing the same. This site is currently on MediaTemple and I have lots of plugins running and the site is still snappy. If you do purchase from them please use my referral link: thanks!.

Wordpress, PHP Memory, and 1and1.comWordpress, PHP Memory, and 1and1.com

Wordpress, PHP Memory, and 1and1.com

Curtis M. Humphrey — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:37:08 +0000

After upgrading from Wordpress 2.7 to 2.7.1, I starting having odd issues. At first I thought it was that some of the plugins I was using need to be updated as I posted about here. However, it I think the problem is closer to the one described at: php-memory-and-wordpress. That is PHP is running out of memory. I am currently hosting the site at 1and1 on a developer package and according to there FAQ:

Due to resource limits on our Shared Hosting machines, it is not possible to allocate more than 20M of memory to PHP, although phpinfo() may report a higher number. You will be unable to increase the memory usage limit with a php.ini file.

O.k., first off why would they allow your to specify a higher number in PHP if they are going to ignore it? According to PHP if a script runs out of memory it will report with a message like this: “Fatal error: Out of memory error.” However, because of 1and1 allow PHP to think it has more memory and then killing it when it exceeds 20M, no error message is reported. I run across this situation on a different project in the past when processing images.

So I decided to test to see if this could be the case. The best page to test I found was the Tools->Import page. That page seem to be the one most likely to stop loading and blank out. It would load all of the admin menus but would not load the import list when some plugins were activated. So I added a few memory_get_usage() function calls and sure enough it appears that whenever the memory when above about 15,300,000 bytes of memory it would die. This is lower than 20MB but memory_get_usage does not necessarily report all memory used as seen by the OS.

Therefore, I must conclude that it is a PHP memory issue and that 1and1.com poor decision to allow PHP to report and indeed set a higher memory limit than 20MB but ignoring that number anyways suppresses the error message resulting in very odd behaviors. Since, Wordpress is a good well used piece of software this is a grave shortfall for 1and1 hosting especially at the developer level. I therefore am in search of a new host as I am not going to continue to pay money to a host with such a poor limit and support of PHP. Hopefully this post might shed some light on odd problems you might be having with Wordpress on 1and1.

Upgrading Wordpress to 2.7.1

Curtis M. Humphrey — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 18:09:58 +0000

It appears that the real problem is php memory. This post seems to echo my problem: php-memory-and-wordpress.

Previous thought but probably wrong…

It appears that in WP-SpamFree 1.9.8.3 breaks Wordpress 2.7.1. It also appears that Broken Link Checker 0.4.10 breaks Wordpress 2.7.1 in the same manner.

I upgraded from 2.7 to 2.7.1 and these plugins seems to cause some admin pages to stall i.e. end displaying html before the ending tag. Case in point, the Tools->Import page does not completely load when the plugin was activated but does when deactivated.

Just thought I pass this info along.

Comparing File Download Managers

Curtis M. Humphrey — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 15:55:06 +0000

The Objectives:

My objective is to find a WordPress plugin that will allow me to at least do:

display in a post a download (link, picture) to an arbitrary file type
to have the link to the download be neat and nice e.g. /download/filename.type
provide a nice upload tool

Furthermore, it would be nice if added the download code to a post provided nice options like a picture or number of hits…

The Search:

So the hunt begins. I went searching through the plugins and I found the following ones a possible candidates.

Wordpress Download Monitor 2.2.3
Attachment Manager 2.0.1
WP-DownloadManager 1.40

Wordpress Download Monitor

Pros: The plugin has a nice admin download page. It does support nice URLs. It also has a very nice integration with the edit post page.

Cons: It seems to require one to list the acceptable file types. It also puts the download admin page under tools, I would have preferred it under Media.

Attachment Manager

Pros: Nice icons to go with the download files.

Cons: Opps, it appears that this one should not have been a candidate for comparison. This one is focused on icons and not really file upload and download.

WP-DownloadManager

Pros: It places the admin pages under a new Download section. Not bad but I would still have preferred under Media. It has many nice options under the admin pages and a nice focus on download listing and stats. I however will probably have little download listing pages.

Cons: The download URLis tied to a number and not a title. Who wants a download url to be /download/1231 and not /download/filename.type?

The Find:

In conclusion I have found that Wordpress Download Monitor to be the plugin to best match my objectives. If your objectives are the same as mine, then I would recommend using this plugin for your file management needs.