Ideal Wordpress memory limit on 16 GB RAM

Question

Hello!

First time question here, and probably a pretty basic one. I have a pretty busy single install Wordpress website on a 16 GB RAM, 4 vCPUs, 320 GB SSD lightsail instance and I am wondering what is the ideal memory limit I should set on the wp-config file? Currently it is set to 512mb.

Any thoughts or ideas on best practices using the above instance are much appreciated.

Answer

Hello and thanks for choosing Lightsail!

I did some reading on the `memory_limit` php.ini option. As indicated by the [documentation](https://www.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.memory-limit), the memory limit is applied on a per-script basis. I think that in WordPress that would also imply per-page-request because each request for a page results in a script execution. With that in mind, my advice would be to increase this value only if you know that the plugins you are using might need more than the 512MB limit set by default. I do not think that the size of the instance's memory would or should affect this decision.

I hope this helps!

Ideal Wordpress memory limit on 16 GB RAM

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