10 things WordPress Plugin developers shouldn’t do.

Here are 10 things you shouldn’t do as a wordpress plugin developer:

1. ini_set(‘memory_limit’,’16M’);
2. ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ’32M’);
3. ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ’64M’);
4. ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ’128M’);
5. ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ’256M’);
6. ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ’512M’);
7. ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ’1024M’);
8. ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ’2048M);
9. php_value memory_limit 64M
10. php_value memory_limit 128M

Quite simply, don’t blindly allocate RAM to a process without checking if the system can have it.  A server we deployed recently had 512mb of RAM and found a plugin allocating 256mb of this to the PHP process.  No wonder the site was falling over with more than 10 visitors.