Allowed memory size of 33554433 bytes exhausted

So, with WP2.8 we reached now the limit of many hosters (32MB), who is the bad boy ? Can we increase the limit ? I faced a similar problem here with my homepage and wrote a simple plugin for the WordPress dashboard which shows up the limit and current usage. Just for the notes, a WordPress 2.3 + NextGEN Gallery and 10 other plugins require 16.32 Mbyte memory.

Ok, what is the limit for a fresh WordPress 2.8 installation under PHP 4 and PHP 5 ?

My hoster support currently both version of PHP, interesting that PHP 5 require less memory (1 MB) . Now, what happen if you the include the german language (de_DE) file ?

I’m very surprised that the gettext() library need more memory under PHP5 (6.5 MB !). Finally I activated NextGEN Gallery and wordTube (plus the german language files) :

As you can see my limit of 36 Mbyte is reached with only two plugins, but the most memory is eaten with PHP5 and the gettext translation. I didn’t expect this. Every PHP version react different,  what is your memory usage under WordPress ?

UPDATE :  The reason for the higher memory consumption is found (THX to Heiko Rabe) : If you have a 64bit OS, then the memory consumption this more the twice as a 32bit OS.  I’ve updated my test tool,  see the attached screenshot (available since PHP 4.4.0 and PHP 5.0.5 )

You can download this test tool for the dashboard here :

Download WP-Memory-Usage
Release @ wordpress.org