Memory quota exceeded using Wordpress on Shared Azure Website - wordpress

I'm trying to wrap my head around a memory quota violation. In the wild, if I have a vm and I try to run something beyond its memory limits (SSMS, for instance, on my VPS), SSMS simply crashes and says "not enough memory, dude."
Apparently on Microsoft Azure, if you request a function that takes you beyond your allocated memory... IT TURNS YOUR SITE OFF FOR AN HOUR.
I can't explain how awful that is, and from the other similar questions I've seen about Azure memory quotas, most of you can't either. BUT...
Is there anyone out here with Wordpress experience on Azure who knows how to keep memory usage down? Alternatively, is there anyone here with Wordpress experience on any platform who can explain what kinds of activities might draw more than 512Meg at a time?
Any help would be good help.
Thanks.

Closing this question because as the first responder said -- there isn't a satisfactory answer. I ended up going with a different hosting company that offers dedicated WP hosting, and have had no issues whatsoever.
I love MS. I use their technology stack whenever feasible, but sometimes you gotta call a spade a spade: I am not sold on Azure yet, though not for lack of trying.

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Firebase storage - inaccessible from the Philippines?

I'm using Firebase storage buckets to host some files. The bucket itself is in the US region, and it seems to be accessible from anywhere in the world - except, earlier in the week a user from the Philippines showed me that no image would load (on the web, as well as the app, and it was this that led me to think it was geo-related). We flipped on the VPN to be in the US, and the images started to load... so I'm confused, are there geo-restrictions on storage buckets, and is there a way we can know of it? Could this be some other issue if anyone else has encountered something like it?
I contacted the Firebase support team and they sent me this:
"We have received similar reports with some ISPs (PLDT) and one of their subsidiaries (Smart communications) in the Philippines. However since the issue is caused by something outside the Google network, there is nothing much we can do. Would you mind trying to try using another network to test other ISPs?
So far, I have created an internal escalation for measurement purposes and to see if there is something that we can do to help, but the general recommendation is to report this directly to the ISP, a couple of other developers have reached out to them and they are waiting for a response, but I think that pushing harder could help here."
I still haven't fixed the issue on my part though.

Howto handle Whisper's pre-allocation in a cloud environment?

I'm setting up a metrics infrastructure and I really like the powerful Graphite api. However, Whisper, the storage backend, does not currently work well for us due to it's disk pre-allocation feature. We run a cloud-based architecture where our apps change host/ip a lot, and since we want the host as part of each metric the Whisper db grows quickly.
How should I setup Graphite/Whisper to handle this situation?
I've also tried to find alternatives to Whisper, but nothing stands out. There are a lot of discussions and half-done solutions for other storage engines, but nothing that seems mature and provides a solid Graphite integration.
Turns it can't be done with Whisper.
I ended up using Cyanite as replacement for Carbon/Whisper, while still keeping Graphite (Graphite-API actually..).

ASP.NET page to reflect server status

I'm looking to create a webpage that will reflect the status of one of my company's servers automatically. Frequently there will be a minor error that only lasts 2-3 minutes, and it would be great to have this reflected on a self-generated page, which might prevent 50-60 unhappy clients from calling in simultaneously and asking what's wrong.
I'm not quite sure where to begin - would anyone have a suggestions for good resources to study? Programming examples? I'm not referring to the basics of writing an ASP.NET page, of course, but rather process interaction in Windows.
Thanks.
To pull this off, you'd need a separate page that essentially runs server diagnostics, otherwise the page wouldn't know if it was up or down. Also, the page would need to be isolated from the sort of problems that are kill other people's requests, such as cache hit problems, memory starvation, high CPU usage, insufficient bandwidth. So ideally the diagnostics would run in a separate app-pool, separate virtual directory, separate machine.
Many of the interesting diagnostics would require a WMI call, but some you can get from the My.Computer namespace.
Also, are you going to do this on every server, or do you want one web server to display the status of several different servers?
It also depends on the type of errors your servers are encountering.
If they are going down completely, or are losing internet connection, then pinging them after an interval of time will let you know if they are up or not.
If you have a specific process running on a server that becomes unavailable, that can be a little more tricky.
Your best bet is to find a way to do a simple request from the services/applications that are important and see if you get a response, if you do, the server is likely up, if not, then it is likely not.
Anything you can do to reduce the number of support calls you get is a good idea, but I'd also focus some time and try to figure out why your servers are going down so often.
Also, telling your users that the server is down, but not giving a reason why may not give the effect you are looking for. Users will still be confused and frustrated when they can't get their work done.
I know you were looking to build a webpage to display the server diagnostics, but there are plenty of server monitoring tools that produce webpages for an easy dashboard view of the history.
A quick google returned the following link:
http://www.webdesignbooth.com/10-really-useful-server-monitoring-tools/

Questions about Hosting customers' ASP.NET sites

Where do you host your customers' ASP.NET sites? I am about to develop a few sites, and I am looking for a good place to host (cheap, fast, good bandwidth, good storage, updates, service packs, etc.)
I have also thought about earning revenue for the hosting/domain, even though I am not actually hosting it (kinda sounds bad when you put it out there). Basically, I would just handle the hosting/domain costs and bill the customer, with a bit of markup. They wont know anything about the host, unless they go digging. Does anyone else incorporate this into their business model? What are the pros/cons?
I like webhost4life. I've tried hosting customer stuff -- you can't charge them enough to deal with the pain. It's much better to give it up to somebody else to deal with the bandwidth and SLAs.
I've used Brinkster for several years & never had any unplanned outages or any real problems. Keep in mind that the sites I've worked on aren't high-volume sites (local restaurants, etc) so I haven't really pushed the envelope bandwidth-wise. Pricing is good & support has always helped me out when I needed it.
A note on marking up hosting...I'm a one-person shop & I tried this once (for a short time), and regretted it immediately. Every tiny email issue, Outlook configuration setting, etc. will result in a customer phone call to you. YMMV, but the markup was never profitable or worthwhile for me personally.
Peer1 is a bit expensive but offers an excellent support when something goes wrong (DNS, email, dabase, service pack...). They help you configure your server and take care of security aspects (amongmany others).
I also use ServerBeach (Peer1's little brother), its self-managed hosting which means you have to take care yourself of the security, the server's configuration, the service packs,... more flexible and less expensive. Support is also excellent.

Implenting a New Message Notification Feature in a Server Farm Scenario

I'm working on a forum based website, the site also supports onsite messaging (ie. the users can send private messages to other users), what I'm trying to do is notify a member if they have new messages, for example by displaying the inbox link in bold and also the number of messgages, e.g. Inbox(3)
I'm a little confused how this can be implemented for a website running on a server farm, querying the database with every request seems like an overkill to me, so this is out of question, probably a shared cache should be used for this, I tend to think this a common feature for many sites including many of the large ones (running on server farms), I wonder how they implement this, any ideas are appreciated.
SO caches the questions, however every postback requeries your reputation. This can be seen by writing a couple of good answers quickly, then refreshing the front page.
The questions will only change every minute or so, but you can watch your rep go up each time.
Waleed, I recommend you read the articles on high scalability. They have specific case studies on the architectures of various mega scale web applications. (See the side bar on the right side of the main page.)
The general consensus these days is that RDBMs usage in this type of application is a bottle neck. It is also probably safe to say that most of the highly scalable web applications sacrifice consistency to achieve availability.
This series should be informative of various views on the topic. A word on scalability is highly cited.
In all this, keep in mind that these folks are dealing with Flickr, Amazon, Tweeter scale issues and architectures. The solutions are somewhat radical departures from the (previously accepted) norms and unless your forum application is the next Big Thing, you may wish to first test out the conventional approach to determine if it can handle the load or not.

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