Of late, WordPress has been giving me “memory exhausted” errors like this, on and off, whenever I uploaded images.

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 73400320 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 1 bytes) in /home/thebears/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1453

Today it finally broke on me on my admin pages, and I could hardly change any settings.

For the uninitiated, this error means that WordPress is needing more memory than it is allowed to – which is a default of 8MB for regular PHP settings. One way to get around this, is to disable some plugins that you don’t really use. However, for my case, the plugins I used were all pretty much in use all the time, so I decided to get more help.

I searched up on the error, and it seems that it is time for us to move on – to allow WordPress to use more memory.

So, how do you go around doing that?

If you have access to your php.ini file, add this to the settings.

memory_limit = 16M ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (16MB)

If not, head on to your .htaccess file and add this line to it.

php_value memory_limit 16M

Done.