BuddyPress

I’ve just set up a clean install of WP on a subdomain of my main domain to test Buddypress. After installing it and clicking ‘Activate’ I got the error ‘HTTP Error 500 (Internal Server Error)’.

I now can’t access the Admin part of the site at all, but I can access the front-end. Could it be something to do with the fact I’ve installed it on a subdomain (error in the .htaccess file perhaps)?

Any suggestions?

Look in your web server’s error log; what messages do you get?

Here’s one of the error messages (I’ve removed IP addresses and paths):

[Fri Jun 03 12:41:34 2011] [error] [client ...] FastCGI: server “/var/www/fcgi/php-cgi” stderr: PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 122880 bytes) in /[...]/wp-admin/includes/upgrade.php on line 1474

It looks like Buddypress is trying to use more than 32MB, which is the amount allocated to my server. I’m not sure if I can change this as it’s a shared host? Is there any way around this?

I’ve just done a new clean install of everything (WP, DB, Buddypress) and the same thing has happened again.

I thought it might be because I’d not changed my permalink setting to anything other than the default, but clearly not. I guess it’s this memory issue which is strange because it’s never been a problem with other plugins/scripts that I’ve used before. Is there any reason why Buddypress is so ‘greedy’ with memory?

Yeah, I’ve had problems – see details of memory usage here: http://buddypress.org/community/groups/how-to-and-troubleshooting/forum/topic/rss-error-in-dashboard#post-88690
If you are on 1and1, then their newer packages may have more memory available….

Interesting. I’m with Fasthosts and while they’re fine for most everything what you get is what you get, so I can’t change the memory allocation.

I’m actually thinking of switching to Media Temple – anyone know if Buddypress works on their Grid-Service?

Yes, but I’m not a fan of the grid service in general. Winds up being slow.

Another hosting company I’ve heard are quite good is Site5 – does anyone know what they’re like?

I am using site5. So far so good. I have a buddypress multisite on their shared hosting service and working just fine. Just installed today, so I have not tested everything yet.

I had a 500 internal server error, but turned out to be my .htaccess file and site5 found the error when I missed it.

What did you do, Iamyeti, to fix the .htaccess file?

32Mb probably won’t cut it; running any kind of busy BP install on shared hosting is going to be dodgy. I did so for a while on my Dreamhost account before I went for a VPS and it was fine, but you may not be so lucky with other hosts.

I would avoid Media Temple. Nice site design; not such great service, is what I’ve been told.