I am running numerous D5 sites at present, all of them on shared hosts. No problems so far, and performance/response is satisfactory.
Recently the update_status module began barfing on one of my sites. I can no longer navigate to admin/logs/updates anymore, without the site crashing with a whole bunch of "mysql database has gone away" errors. Plus, it kills my cron tasks.
As far as I can tell, it is the MAX_ALLOWED_PACKET parameter of mysql that is the problem, however, with my shared host I have been unable to convince them that this parameter should be increased. (On my shared host it is 16M... drupal recommends that this param be 64M).
So I have had to disable the module.
Now that "update status" is moved into core for D6, I am thinking that this could kill Drupal wrt shared hosts... certainly it renders the update_status functionality pretty much useless in those environments.
Does anyone else have a similar experience with update status being resource hungry? On the official drupal issues section there is considerable discussion about reducing the memory usage of update_status... nothing particularly helpful however, IMHO.
Id be interested to hear whether any others in the G&G community have experienced similar issues with the module, and if so, can anyone suggest a workaround?
At the moment I am thinking of just running update_status on my local server (so that I can tweak all the necessary server params), artificially configured with a boatload of ALL the modules that I use across all of my sites, but this seems a little crazy...
