Allowed memory size of (...) exhausted

Question

I'm stuck trying to figure out what seems to be a very common problem, the above mentioned "Allowed memory size of (...) exhausted". After developing my first theme I was moving it (just the theme, not the whole WP installation) from my development computer to my production server. After installing WP everything seemed fine and the site was working great with the default theme. Upon activating my custom theme however WP started throwing the error,

PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 523800 bytes) in /srv/www/my.domain.com/public_html/wp-includes/cache.php on line 113

Worth mentioning is that I've never had any issues like this during development.

I've tried to increase both the memory limit in php.ini as well as setting the WP_MEMORY_LIMIT constant in wp-config without luck.

php -i | grep memory
memory_limit => 128M => 128M

cat wp-config.php | grep MEMORY
define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '128M');

As you can see I've worked my way up to 128M. Still hitting the error I'm thinking this is getting ridiculous and not likely the source of my problem. As far as I can recall I never had to go much beyond 32M on much larger WP installations in the past.

Answer 1

Turns out this issue was caused by bad code (a missing assert) in my theme. More specifically the theme requires a custom navigation menu. As this menu hadn't been created and assigned the site crashed. Why this caused an memory exhaustion error on my production server and not my development computer I unfortunately don't know.

Answer 2

Sometime ini_set('memory_limit', '128M');

gives error if you don't have permission to change.

This will work fine if you have permission to change the limits.

This you find in mysql if you are using mysql database

Path for finding the answer is

mysql\bin\my.ini

ini_set('memory_limit, -1'); overrides the default PHP memory limit.

Another answer will be by modifying .htaccess file Open or create the .htaccess file in the root folder and add the following code: 1 php_value upload_max_filesize 64M 2 php_value post_max_size 64M

Again, it is important that we emphasize that if you are on a shared hosting package, then these techniques may not work. In that case, you would have to contact your web hosting provider to increase the limit for you.