Some years ago, WP could run with less than 8MB.
By now, it is recommended to find a host providing more than 32MB and better is 64MB…
Recently, I just discovered some NoSQL framework, like Fat Free FrameWork with MongoDB.
And some article just compare the RAM footprint between WP and other framework…
http://www.laurencegellert.com/2011/06/memory-usage-in-php-frameworks/
No surprise, WP requires about 20-30MB depending on the plugins and themes activated.
WP is growing fat like Windows OS years before…
The more web host provide memory for PHP, the more WP is eating this memory ?
The problem is obvious when you look at the ratio between the memory usage compared with the size of the content produced at the end.
A web page is about 100KB in HTML, the same for CSS and JavaScript.
Images are between 100KB up to 1MB.
Only Videos are requiring more than 1MB and PHP just don’t handle videos streaming very well
(…PHP xmoov tries to provide some solution)
When most of websites built with WP contains less than 100 pages of user generated content; if you count 100KB per page, it would require about 10MB to load in memory 100 web pages at each request.
So why bothering to add a MySQL layer if it consumes more memory than loading the whole content ?
And is it so necessary to use 30MB to handle a content of 10MB ?
WP would really need an optimized, lightweight edition.