Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 71 bytes)

Question

I'm getting an error when I try to open one of my dashboard pages in my wordpress script

The error message is as follows:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 71 bytes) in /home/admin/domains/filesick.com/public_html/wp-includes/taxonomy.php on line 2685

I asked around and was told I have to increase the memory_limit to something higher than 256M, so I changed it to 512M and still the same problem. Then I changed it to 3024M and this is what I have now, but that didn't fix the problem.

So could you please tell me how to fix this and what should I do?

Waiting for your response.

Answer 1

WordPress overrides PHP's memory limit to 256M, with the assumption that whatever it was set to before is going to be too low to render the dashboard. You can override this by defining WP_MAX_MEMORY_LIMIT in wp-config.php:

define( 'WP_MAX_MEMORY_LIMIT' , '512M' );

I agree with DanFromGermany, 256M is really a lot of memory for rendering a dashboard page. Changing the memory limit is really putting a bandage on the problem.

Answer 2

I had this problem. I searched the internet, took all advices, changes configurations, but the problem is still there. Finally with the help of the server administrator, he found that the problem lies in MySQL database column definition. one of the columns in the a table was assigned to 'Longtext' which leads to allocate 4,294,967,295 bites of memory. It seems working OK if you don't use MySqli prepare statement, but once you use prepare statement, it tries to allocate that amount of memory. I changed the column type to Mediumtext which needs 16,777,215 bites of memory space. The problem is gone. Hope this help.