I have been noticing intermittent Internal Server Error messages occuring with WordPress for the past several weeks, and inquired today with my ISP, Pair Networks, about the problem. Apparently, my blog is exceeding the allowed memory allocation for scripts allowed to run on their server. In other words, I’m being a memory hog.

The culprit? I don’t know! So I’m trying a bunch of things in order to be a good shared hosting customer…

• I’ve reduced the # of posts appearing on the front page from “7 posts” to “last 4 days”. I suspect Markdown might be eating a lot of memory too, or possibly LZIL on initial processing, but the images are not that large.

• I’ve gone through PHP-MarkDown and removed some processing I don’t use, such as the Image support (LZIL handles this) and the use of underscores.

• I’m also trying out a new WordPress Caching Plugin by Ricardo Galli. He rants a bit about how WordPress compiles a lot of PHP plugin code regardless of whether it needs to run or not, which eats a lot of CPU. The installation is fairly straightforward…this is NOT a plugin, but a piece of code that sits in your wp-content directory.

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p>The result is that pages are served more quickly now, hopefully reducing the load overall on the server.