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.
10 Comments
I have the same problem trying to use Typo3 with the Web Empowered Church configuration. Right out of the box, the website itself crashes with “Out of memory”.
I hope you find a good alternate provider. For now, I’m going to use a machine of my own for development work until I’m ready to publish.
Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo
Hi !
I am Piter Kokoniz. oOnly want to tell, that your blog is really cool
And want to ask you: will you continue to post in this blog in future?
Sorry for my bad english:)
Thank you:)
Piter.
Thanks Piter, and the answer is yes. I actually have quite a bit of material to post that is currently trapped in a different system. I plan to do that, plus renovations this month.
Any news on the 1and1.com issue? Just installed the latest version 2.83 and everything works fine but the home page. sidebar and footer won’t display.
Same problem here with 1and1 and wordpress. I WISH I had really done more research on hosts before choosing 1and1, even before this phpMemory issue, this host is below average.
Hi Curtis, sorry to tell you this but Piter is a spam bot. You might want to delete his post.
I’m also experiencing the horror that is working with 1 and 1. I”m digging dreamhost more.
So Piter is a spam bot, lol… figures. Dreamhost might be good, it just depends on what you value. I was intrigued by MediaTemple’s architecture for scalability both on the package I purchased and for the future if I need even more performance. One of the issues I disliked a lot with 1 and 1 was that every time I changed the package had to do all the transfer work. If you go dream-host and it resolves your issues let me know.
I’ve been using 1and1 for >7 years and I also use wordpress a LOT. I host at least a dozen wordpress sites as well as drupal, joomla and a couple other commerce-based packages. In general I’ve been happy but have had my share of issues.
One of these issues is the PHP memory limit. I do use php.ini to set memory to 20m and when I started doing that, it fixed many issues on most of my blogs. I can confirm that without that setting, many of my blog admin pages crash with 500 error or other timeouts. So it’s at least doing something, and I make it the default on all my sites — a php.ini in root and a copy of it in wp-admin. Every time I do a WP upgrade, I make sure I put this file in both places.
Probably true and as long as your number of plug-ins in minimal you are just fine. I had several plug-ins and that adds to the memory requirements. I’m glad you shared your experience!