Steven Zahm@ Mary
re: I have a hosting account with GoDaddy. When these plugins are active they max out the memory, the “I/O” and sometimes the CPU which causes the site to go down.
There’s no reason for Connections to cause this. The only frontend page on the site where extra load would be the directory page and even that is marginal unless showing hundred or thousands of entries at once which would not be recommended. That would not be a Connections limitation as the same issue would occur if you would try to display hundreds or thousand of WordPress posts on a single page.
re: I am already at the maximum memory resources of 2048mb for a shared server account.
This sounds a bit excessive if you are talking about the memory being allocated to PHP. most users I would recommend 128MB, very few actually need that much let alone more.
re: I know some customizations were performed on this plugin, but I dont know what they were, and I dont have access to the web person who did them.
Not knowing the the mods were, I suppose those changes could cause this issue for you. The thing is, they would have to be some serious changes. My recommendation would to make backup copies of Connections and cMap and then backup your database then install “clean” and current versions to see if the issue persists. If it does, then you know it was the modded versions. The backups are in case something goes really wrong so you’ll be able to revert.
Hoe that helps, let me know what you find.