WordPress memory exhausted errors

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.

Comments

  1. Hello Kian Ann!

    Sure is nice to read about your solution! Any chance you can reveal how you manage to exceed 8MB for your blog?

    I run quite a but of interesting plugins but I haven’t got such problem at the time being. Who knows one day your sharing might comes in handy with a proper understanding of the causes and effects.

    Really appreciate your insights if you care to share your cause!

    Thanks in advanced!

  2. Hey Wai Loong,

    To be frank, I have no idea! I don’t have a lot of plugins installed, and as you can see my blog template is really as clean as it can be.

    While I was on wp2.2, the issue was on and off. Sometimes I get this memory exhausted error when I upload images… and in wp2.3, I couldn’t even get WordPress to run without increasing the memory limit. 😛

  3. WordPress is a bit bloated :mrgreen:
    After running xDebug on the script I found that an virgin wordpress 2.3.3 install uses 8744088 bytes (8.7mb) of memory just to show the index page.

    It also takes (on my Athlon 1.9Ghz, 1GB RAM) .70 seconds (almost a full second) to create the page – so for .7 seconds your server has +8mb of memory tied up. it would only take 10 users online at the same time to fill up 80mb of RAM!

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