When You Need a Boost

A common challenge in running shared hosting servers is how to ensure everyone gets a fair portion of the shared resources, and prevent any one misbehaving or resource-intensive script from affecting the performance and stability of the server for everyone else. One of those shared resources is memory (or RAM).

A site needs memory, and the server needs to provision it, at the instant a visitor arrives at a website, and during every successive page load. Simple HTML websites need very little memory; complex sites, based on robust content management systems like Joomla or Drupal, can use quite a bit.

Where memory really gets eaten up fast though is during on-the-fly image resizing, a feature common to many content management systems, image gallery applications, and banner ad management software.  Even if an image is only three or four megabytes on your hard drive, resizing it on a webserver can take ten times that much memory!

The actual formula is something like (pixel height * pixel width * color depth), plus some overhead for data storage. To illustrate, I just built a quick image resizing memory requirement estimator tool. Resizing images on your computer prior to upload is an easy way to reduce your server memory requirements.

To manage shared memory and preserve service quality on the Modwest shared hosting system,  we maintain generous resource limits, and today we have some new flexibility to announce.

When memory limits are exceeded, the page will fail to load, display a dreaded Internal Server Error and usually throw a line in your error log similar to:

FATAL:  emalloc():  Unable to allocate 11306785 bytes

If resizing images prior to upload is not an option, or if you're exceeding memory limits for reasons other than image resizing, there is a solution:

We can now increase memory limits on a site-by-site basis.

We're calling it a "Memory Boost". It's not advertised on our website yet, but it is available now.

Each Memory Boost makes an additional 32 Megabytes of memory available to your scripts running on the Modwest shared system.  Up to two may be added to a site at $5/month each.

Memory Boost won't make a slow site run faster, but may come in handy for memory-hungry sites on our shared system that are bumping up against those service-quality resource limits from time to time.

Need a 'Boost? Just contact us.

Comments

[squiggle]

Nice offering, you trying to make me lazy?

Currently I code to standards (learned a lot from that). I also take the time to resize images on my own machine, that takes no time at all. On my VPS, each site pretty much operates in a few megabytes of memory with the exception of the odd application package.

So, I'm now wondering, if you tax memory usage do you also do rebates? :*)

[eferrini]

Modwest Team,

Is there a way we can test our Web site/CMS for memory usage? We are running a CMS, but not Drupal or Joomla.

Thanks,
Tony

[John Masterson]

Tony,

In the current shared hosting environment, the only way to test for memory utilization is to exceed the limit, resulting in an Internal Server Error and "Unable to allocate" messages in the /logs/error_log.

In the new environment (http://blog.modwest.com/2009/04/new-shared-hosting-environment-an-introduction.html), PHP's memory-checking functions (http://php.net/manual/en/function.memory-get-peak-usage.php) will be provisionally available.

Bear in mind that having a higher memory ceiling doesn't make a complex CMS site run faster, it will just prevent the error.