This blog uses WordPress (hosted with GoDaddy on economy Linux something-or-other). At some point, the admin dashboard became intolerably slow. I had been living with it -I try not to fiddle too much under the hood in case I break something. And I also fear having to reacquaint myself with PHP.

But when things start timing out you kind of have to bite the bullet.

I saw (under plugins>>System Info) that my WP memory limit was 40Mb. What even gets out of beds for 40Mb these days?

I thought it was weird.

Google agreed. I found a couple of sites suggesting upping this will help performance.

Up WordPress memory limits

You can change the limit by editing the wp-confg.php, which is your WordPress deployment’s root directory.

I added the following two lines (that’s all!):

define('WP_MAX_MEMORY_LIMIT', '512M');
define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '512M');

I use a notepad++ ftp extension to tap into files on the remote server. GoDaddy also gives you an in-browser file explorer which you could probably use just as easily.

Problem fixed for me. Reminded me of the instance performance you get sticking some RAM in a PC in old days.

My site did misbehaviour for few minutes after changes (503 codes). Not sure how WP/PHP reconfigures – maybe something to do with that?