ianmcn

Thanks for the reply. I’m confused though, this issue is stopping me from even being able to install the plugin. Surely that’s not happening to everyone? Is there anything I can check or change to allow it to install?

Just read the WordPress Requirements page. This clearly states that all you need is PHP4.2 or greater and MySQL 3.23.23 or greater. If, as pizdin_dim claims it is impossible to make WP work well on the default 8MB PHP config, then that really ought to be stated as a requirement.

“If the majority of WP users are using hosting with memory limit set to 8MB then WP coders have to cater for this.”

Who told you that?

Note the If at the beginning of my sentence! No one has told me this, but I’m speculating that by the number of people complaining about memory usage there are probably a lot of people that do use 8MB. And don’t forget, it does work on 8MB – I’ve been using it for 2 years like that! It seems to me that by a bit of code and SQL optimisation it could continue to run successfully using a minimal amount of memory allocation. Most people want to run this on cheap hosting, most cheap hosting is set up with default options which for PHP is 8MB memory limit. If WP doesn’t run continuously and successfully on this setup then it puts it into a completely different league, with a lot less potential users.

Sorry pizdin_dim – please read what I write! “it used to work fine but as the site grows it is noticably slowing down and consuming more memory.” – I’m talking about the site growing, not the software! As explained in my original post, I have never upgraded WP from 1.5.2, it’s other people that have brought in issues regarding v2 etc… I know nothing about them.

The version of WP I’m now having problems with on an expensive VPS is the same version I ran with no problems on ￡11/month shared hosting. My original question was not questioning how much memory it uses, but questioning how the memory usage had seemingly inexplicably gone up! The visitor numbers have crept up slightly over time but not significantly – it only gets about 1000 hits a day.

If the majority of WP users are using hosting with memory limit set to 8MB then WP coders have to cater for this. I’m a webdesigner by trade and whilst I prefer a high screen resolution on my computer I still have to cater for people that only have 800×600 monitors – I can’t just rule them out because they won’t or can’t upgrade! It’s the same in this case, you have to compromise some things in order to reach the mass market.

pizdin_dim – I think you’re completely missing the point here! I have no doubt that optimising my database would make a difference, but that’s not the point. When I originally chose WP what attracted me to it was the fact that it ran smoothly and quickly, even on the ￡11/year hosting I was on at the time! (I’m now paying significantly more for much better hosting, but that’s beside the point)

The majority of WP users do not want to be paying hundreds of pounds/dollars a year for hosting or spending days optimising their database – WP gained popularity because it was incredibly easy to install (The famous one step install!), lightweight, easy to manage and of course free! Having to buy expensive hosting or tune up databases really negates the whole point of it!

Also, one of my original points was that WP was getting worse over time – it used to work fine but as the site grows it is noticably slowing down and consuming more memory.

This could be down to a memory usage problem, see this post for more details.

Wow, didn’t expect that many replies by the morning! Just to add my 2p: I think that streamlining WP should actually be one of the developers priorities as a lot of people run it on shared hosting that will have the default 8MB memory allocation and they expect it to work on that!

As I mentioned in my initial post, I have run WP successfully for nearly a year now on the 8MB setup (and previously for some time on some ￡11/year shared hosting!), it is only now I’m getting problems – the main one being the wp-admin/post.php page not reloading after making a change to a page. Reading these forums I found plenty of people reporting this problem, but no answers – it was only when checking my error-logs that I realised what was happening! This is the kind of problem that would make your average user just give up on it, if WP wants to continue to succeed as an open source, but easy to manage blogging package then it is imperitive that it sorts out these memory issues.

Finally, my main question was not “Why doesn’t WP work properly on 8MB?” but “Why doesn’t it work properly anymore?!” Is it something to do with DB scaling problems?

Anyway, glad to have instigated this debate – it’s time to put some pressure on!

I have the same problem with 1.5.2, anyone found any cures?

Just to confirm what adminbarnhardnl said, the problem I described is a safemode issue. I have also just had safemode turned off on my hosting and it immediately started working fine.

Seeing as a lot of shared hosting has safemode on, I can imagine this being a problem for a lot of people, it must be worth implementing this feature in a different way?

Thanks for the reply SpencerC, although I have no doubt your solution would work it seems crazy that you have to go back to some 1.5 functionality in order to upload things!

I wouldn’t mind so much if it was just for me, but I’m setting up wordpress for a client and I can hardly say “Don’t use that nice looking image upload tool on the write page, go to the completely seperate upload page instead”!

At the moment I’m leaning towards installing WP1.5 with wysiwordpress but I’m not delighted with that option.

Just to give some background, I am using an Apache server with FP extentions turned off, but PHP safemode is turned on. This is not something I have control over, could it be an issue?

I also have this problem, I have changed all related folders to 777 just to make sure, but it still doesn’t work.

I don’t have FP extensions installed, but I do get the feeling that this problem is caused by a conflict with something on my server as reading this thread makes it look like some people it works for straight away and others it doesn’t work for at all.

Any programmers have any ideas?

I get the same problem on a blog I’ve set up for a mate on his IIS hosting account – never had this problem before on Linux.

All permissions are set correctly so don’t ask me to check them! I reckon it’s something to do with WP being on IIS

hmmm… now there’s an idea! I’d forgotten you could associate images with links…

I’m not actually doing this for myself (If I was I’d just hard code them in) but I’m setting it up for someone else who isn’t very computer literate so I’m trying to make it as simple as possible.

I couldn’t ignore the get_links tag as I needed a way to display all links plus categories and descriptions on the main links page (using get_links_list) but on the front page I only wanted 2 categories and no descriptions – using get_links achieved this, but as Craig pointed out it doesn’t display categories – I finally came up with the following:

<?php
$link_cats = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT cat_id, cat_name FROM $wpdb->linkcategories WHERE cat_id=1");
foreach ($link_cats as $link_cat) {
?>
<li id="linkcat-<?php echo $link_cat->cat_id; ?>"><?php echo $link_cat->cat_name; ?>

<?php get_links($link_cat->cat_id, '
• ', '

', '', FALSE, 'url', FALSE); ?>

<?php } ?>

repeat the above for each category you wish to show, changing “WHERE cat_id=1” to the relevant category. Not sure if this is the most elegant solution, but it works!

For an update to WP, can we have a parameter on link categories for show_on_sidebar or something like that? It would make it a lot more versatile