SMF and PHP memory usage file upload

Question

I'm helping out in a forum that runs on SMF. The site has been lagging recently and our host tells us it's the file uploads that clogs the servers memory and that SMF is using server memory in a non optimized way. There's probably one file upload every hour at most so the load isn't that high.

Any thoughts on this? I don't know php to the extent that i can argue against them.

Answer 1

If PHP is run as an Apache module, used memory will not always be returned when the PHP script ends. There are a couple of ways to fix this:

• Use less memory in your script (obviously)
• Run your script as CGI instead of as an Apache module (this way, the memory will be returned on script exit)
• Restart Apache when the memory needs to be reclaimed. This is not really a good solution, but we do it at Levonline twice a day...
• Upgrade your hosting to your own server, where you don't have to think about the hosting provider's other customers, and can use as much memory as you want.