We've been having a problem with a commercially-hosted Drupal website maxing out server memory.

I talked to our Drupal/PHP guy and he went through his rule of thumb, which is, every page loaded by a relatively complex Drupal site will take at least 10MB and maybe as much as 25MB.

I don't normally consider this kind of calculation -- it's only because $work doesn't do Drupal and we had to host outside that it even came up.

Does that seem right to Monks? It sounds like an enormous amount of memory to me to load a page which is less than 100Kb when it gets to the browser.

What does a site like Perlmonks use, per page impression, as a comparison? Is PHP particularly memory-hungry? Is MySQL to blame? Or is that amount of RAM per page quite normal? Or is his rule of thumb wrong?

Why am I asking here? Because Monks are smart, and because I know our PHP/Drupal guy won't see the question if I ask it here...


In reply to OT: How much memory does a database-backed website use? by Cody Fendant

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.