[development] drupal php requirement : more than 8 Mb now?

[James Walker]

On 12/13/05 10:10 AM, Khalid B wrote:
>>> On 13 Dec 2005, at 12:13, Christophe Chisogne wrote:
>>>> I had a strange problem while importing a new po file in drupal 4.6.4/5.
>>>> Finally, I found the solution [3] : memory_limit should be higher than
>>>> 8Mb.
>>> instead of increasing the memory limit, I'd like to see us investigate
>>> how we can reduce the memory requirements of the locale module's parser.
>> while I'm all for optimizations... and Drupal's RAM usage could
>> definitely use some optimizations, the fact is RAM is fairly cheap, and
>> PHP's default 8M is a bit dated. Most larger scale projects these days
>> recommend 16M (in fact I heard rumours that the PHP team is considering
>> up'ing the default).
> 
> You are technically right. But in the real world, we will be shutting out many
> users who use shared hosting and have no control on how much memory they
> can allocate to PHP.
> 
> I do not like to see more people deprived of using Drupal because of these
> constraints.
> 
> We are much better off tuning and optimizing locale, going to split
> mode, ...etc.

Absolutely. Sites of all sizes win with memory usage optimizations... 
I'm all for it. While I still maintain split mode is a bit too extreme 
(and presents some complications beyond it's quite impressive RAM usage 
numbers) - I think it hints towards what's important here. Drupal loads 
too much code into RAM per-request.

There are lots of ways to cut this down.. (long help text removed 
.module files, libraries / helper functions moved to .incs, etc - locale 
has already done some of this, but clearly has work still to do).

I was merely pointing out that hitting PHP's 8M limit is not at all 
uncommon, and not the end of the world.
-- 
James Walker :: http://walkah.net/ :: xmpp:walkah at walkah.net