PHP Memory limit not taking effect in normal php scripts

Question

I've assigned the memory limit of php to 999m so it appears in phpinfo like

memory_limit 999M 999M

when I use phpinfo(); to show it.

Unfortunately when I try to run a fairly large script, it seems like the limit is 256M

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 40 bytes) in /xxx/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 1403

Anyone have any ideas why or what I can do to increase the limit (and have it actually work)

If it helps I'm running centos5 32bit and with php running in fcgi mode

Answer 1

I installed php74 with macports. When I ran php --ini it was showing that my ini files are in '/opt/local/etc/php74' directory. There was two files: php.ini-development & php.ini-production. I changed memory_limit on these files but still there was no effect.

Then I created a new file 'php.ini' in the same directory and changed the limit on that file. Then the effect took place. When I ran php -i | grep "memory_limit" I could see the updated value.

Answer 2

Type php --ini to find the configuration paths.

Change memory_limit to whatever value you need. Make sure that you are changing it on both these files: php.ini and conf.d/php-memory-limits.ini

(in my case, I use -1 to have unlimited memory (of course, not unlimited but as much as my computer can handle))

Answer 3

Make sure you server/virtual server in apache is not configured to overwrite PHP configuration. Even if you use:

php_value memory_limit 512M

Your server may have something like:

php_value memory_limit 32M

which will make your changes in php.ini useless. To fix this:

• Either edit the php_value value in your server configuration.
• Or remove it from your web server, so it uses PHP global settings.

Answer 4

I had a similar issue, for me it was an extra ini file that was loaded called "99-liip-developer.ini". At the top of the file the memory_limit was defined at 265M, which overwrote the memory_limit defined in php.ini.

Hope this helps anyone.

Answer 5

Create a php file called test.php, put inside:

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Check for "Configuration File (php.ini) Path" and "Loaded Configuration File" to see the correct php.ini path. Edit php.ini and search for memory_limit and set it to:

memory_limit = 999M

Check if you have more than one occurrency of memory_limit into the php.ini file. In the case, delete it.

Stop apache, and then restart it (apachectl restart | apachectl graceful | kill -1 are not ok. Stop, then start).

Recheck test.php to see if the new parameter got acquired.

Answer 6

Unsure, but this came up in the google search for me:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-cbnet-ping-optimizer-lots-of-errors-on-ping-optimizer-_help-please

The ping optimizer was cramming a table full on the DB and clearing solved the problem. The error was almost the same:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 80 bytes) in /home/user1/public_html/domain/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 1400

So see if a plugin is doing the same, then clear it and log it on WP somewhere so it can be fixed if that is the problem.

Answer 7

You can try putting this at the top of your file

ini_set('memory_limit', '999M')

How much system memory do you have available? Did you restart Apache after editing your php.ini file (I assume you have php installed as a module)?

Try:

sudo /etc/init.d/httpd restart

Answer 8

I suggest you set this on the top of your script:

 ini_set("memory_limit","512M");

in the script that is consuming so much of your memory instead of allowing all scripts to consume so much memory. You can also put this in the .htaccess of your /wp-includes/

 php_value memory_limit 512M

More information and explanation here: http://www.mydigitallife.info/php-allowed-memory-size-exchausted-fatal-error/