Hitting Host's 500 MB Memory Usage (RAM) Limit

  • Hi Everyone,

    My hosting provider is in the process of upgrading to CloudLinux, which enables them to impose memory usage (RAM) limits on each account on a server. The limit they’ve imposed is a 500MB cap. They’re doing this to keep one site/account from monopolizing resources and slowing down the others and/or causing outages.

    I have multiple wordpress sites hosted with them, a few on differing servers (it’s a reseller account), and now all of my sites are running into issues loading because they are hitting the memory usage limits.

    In any case, the entries in my site’s error log all look something like this:

    [Thu Apr 28 14:50:51 2011] [error] [client 75.xxx.xx.xxx] (12)Cannot allocate memory: couldn’t create child process: /opt/suphp/sbin/suphp for /home/zicl/public_html/wp-content/themes/headway-101/media/css/layout.php, referer: https://www.examplesite.com/wp-content/themes/headway-101/style.css

    [Thu Apr 28 15:00:27 2011] [error] [client 75.xxx.xx.xxx] (12)Cannot allocate memory: couldn’t create child process: /opt/suphp/sbin/suphp for /home/imq/public_html/wp-content/themes/headway-101/media/css/typography.php, referer: https://www.examplesite.com/wp-content/themes/headway-101/style.css

    And the WP errors logs have entries like this:

    [28-Apr-2011 04:32:37] PHP Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 20447232) (tried to allocate 131072 bytes) in /home/imq/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 3071

    [27-Apr-2011 23:53:05] PHP Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 18087936) (tried to allocate 78 bytes) in /home/zicl/public_html/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 949

    The host is, of course, blaming the issue on WP and my plugins/themes. However, the sites all use themes from popular providers such as Thesis, Headway, Studiopress, and WooThemes. Most sites only have 1-3 plugins, all of which are popular and vetted by many users. No caching plugins, no cron jobs, etc. Nothing resource-heavy. These are cpanel accounts, and most have fewer than 500 visits/day and between 50-1000 pages/posts.

    My question is, should 500MB RAM memory usage limit be too low to run WP? Or does every one of my sites have some kind of issue that makes them take up more memory than they should? They were built at different times, on different servers, with different themes, and so I am kinda at a loss here.

    If anyone could provide any insight, I would be very, very, very appreciative. I am really stressed right now, as I’ve worked my tail off for years to build a business that supports my family, and right now my income has been cut back to a trickle.

Viewing 4 replies - 31 through 34 (of 34 total)

  • Waiting too! I’ll check back later. I’m going back to my HG support with a few more questions. This is crazy, all these errors. SO far, my site is not getting disabled again by server control personnel, so I guess I’m happy for now.

    THAT was really unpleasant & happened right in the middle of the big event I was marketing for, just when my clicks & traffic started going really really well, the whole thing went down with internal error blah blah. We all learn the ‘overloaded server’ lesson the hard way, putting off the expensive VPS or dedicated server account upgrade until it we are forced.

    It was not difficult to upgrade, HG did all the work, but I’m disappointed that the same issues are happening PLUS a new error. Heavy Sigh. I’m going outside to remember clear the dust.

    I am getting the same errors: cannot allocate memory: couldn’t create child process: /opt/suphp/sbin/suphp

    It is on various files.

    My issue started around June 5th. I had about 8 sites on a shared hosting acct with Hostgator for a year and in this one day something happened and my account hit their 25% memory usage and everything ground to a halt.

    As of today all of my sites are on a VPS level 7 with them but the errors persist. I don’t think the original problem got taken care of and now I can’t figure out what is happening.

    The 2 things I did on that day I removed and they were just graphics that were ads so no new plugins or scripts. I have disable, uninstalled and upgraded plugins on all sites. I installed Total Cache on all and repaired all databases. Still the problem persists.

    Hostgator has spent many hours on the phone with me but they can’t figure it out either. They even upgraded the memory allocated for PHP to 2 GB because it was set to 64 MG.

    Can anyone help? How can I go back and figure out what happened on that day to cause the problem? Is there a tool(s) to track down the cause?

    Thanks for your help.

    I have had similar issues, as well. I can’t seem to narrow it down to one particular plugin or anything. If all plugins are removed, it seems to be okay, but adding them back in eventually hits a threshold the server can’t handle. My site is not huge, so I have a hard time imagining that I’m pulling far more resources than normal.

    I wish the WP team would address this. When I asked about it before, I was basically told to just upgrade my hosting, but that seems like more of a band-aid fix than a real solution.

    I believe I have found the cause of all these issues!
    CloudLinux (excellent idea and product) limits my RAM to 256MB.
    My host has PHP’s memory_limit set to 128MB.
    When a PHP page is first called, the memory_limit of 128MB is assigned (for ~100 milliseconds), then reduced to the actual RAM required (in my case, 524KB).
    I’m not using WordPress, but have AJAX code calling multiple PHP pages simultaneously – wham, I hit the limit.
    I have some (relatively) simple demo code, which you are free to copy and use to test with at:
    https://DingoSeatCovers.com.au/demo
    The PHP pages are one-liners.
    I’m trying to persuade my Website Host to reduce PHP’s memory_limit from 128MB to reduce this issue.
    Anyone have contacts with Apache/PHP to see if the “assign memory_limit” could be changed?
    Contacted CloudLinux, but no success, as they do not consider it their problem – fair enough, I think.

    Most aggravating thing is, Website Hosts see this as a “we have found the heavy users, and they are the problem”. No, the heavy users are more likely to see this issue, but the problem is a very high PHP memory use (very brief, but actual) and CloudLinux seeing that breaching the limit.

    My code (not fancy) did not automatically retry when finding 500 errors, so I saw the exact problem much earlier and more easily.
    Most good code (jQuery and WP) is likely to retry the 500 errors, and so mask this problem from sites with low usage.

Viewing 4 replies - 31 through 34 (of 34 total)
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