Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 30408704)

Should I disable the plugins before trying auto upgrade?

Yes. ideally you should do this before all core upgrades – not just when you have memory problems. Also try switching to the Twenty Ten theme. And you have backed up your database, haven’t you?

Could I do a manual upgrade rather than auto?

It won’t make any difference in this situation.

Is it possible the SQL database needs splitting

Unlikely – given its size.

You MUST also upgrade to PHP and MySQL 5 before attempting an upgrade.

Yes, I backup the database weekly, although have never tried to do a reload from the backup. I use a plugin for that. PHP is 5.2.17 and I am on MySQL5.0.

My fear in disabling plugins and trying the upgrade again is that it will partially complete and leave me without a working site. Is that likely once it starts?

Any other thoughts?

Steve

Is that likely once it starts?

It’s possible but fairly rare. It’s still all fixable as long as you have a good database backup. Your PHP & My SQL versions are fine.

The only other thing I can suggest is to contact your hosts and ask them if they can temporarily extend your PHP memory allocation to allow to to complete the upgrade. It is in their best interests to ensure that you keep WordPress up to date. I realise that you have tried to increase the PHP memory yourself but the methods suggested don’t always work with every host. Sometimes it requires a change at the host level.

Longer term, you shouldn’t hit the same problems as – from WP 3.2 onwards – updates are only partial and should consume far less memory.

I contacted 1and1 about assigning more memory and got this back:

The memory limit on your current shared hosting package is limited to 30MB only. You may max out the memory limit by creating a php.ini file and put this line of code:

memory_limit = 30M

Then upload the php.ini file to the directories where you want the file to take effect. Please do understand that due to resource limits on our Shared Hosting machines, it is not possible to allocate more than 30M of memory to PHP via the memory_limit directive, although phpinfo() may report a higher number. While you may specify more than 30M for the memory_limit PHP directive via a php.ini or .htaccess file, the server will not allocate more than 30M.”

Would I be able to do the manual upgrade to 3.2.1 with this amount of memory?

Steve

I have the exact same problem (as Steve above) on my self-hosted web site at 1and1.com! They at least gave Steve the reason that there is a problem with this working at the 1and1.com hosting site.

Does this mean that to do an automatic update of WordPress to version 3.2.1, that we have to go to a different provider that will have a higher self-imposed Memory limit than 30 Meg for PHP running?

Steve, What WordPress plugin are you using to do automatic updates of your WordPress database. Thanks.

What new Hosting provider do you recommend other than 1and1.com that will not put such a low limit on PHP Memory Allocation?

Thanks,
Burt

I use “WordPress Database Backup” to make my weekly database backups. I think that is the question you asked?

I still haven’t tried to make the upgrade – I am not 100% sure that a manual upgrade with 30M of memory will work, and have not managed to find confirmation of this. I understand it will work fine once the upgrade has taken place.

I don’t particularly want to move away from 1and1 as I have a lot of URLs and sites all hosted in one package. It would be a lot of work to shift, and, apart from this glitch, they have been reliable.

Anyone know if the manual upgrade takes more than 30M of memory?

Steve

Steve,

Thanks for the info on what plug-in you are using to do your database backups.

I am trying to convince the support people at 1and1.com to increase the memory in their basic packages for PHP Memory Allocation, but I am not currently having much success with this endeavor. This is what they said:

“That is our PHP memory limit in the current package that you have. If you do wish to increase your PHP memory limit, you can upgrade your package to one of our Dual Linux hosting packages. Dual Basic = 60 MB”

This seems to me like a poor business decision on their part, and they may loose customers for it.

I don’t know what the minimum Memory Allocation would be to Automatically Upgrade WordPress. Do you or anyone else have any idea?

Thanks,
Burt

On 1and1 host myself … after getting this error and troubleshooting for a while, what finally worked was disabling all of my plugins, I ran the upgrade, and it worked.

Great news. Now will Burt or I try the upgrade next?

Steve

I have also got the same problem with 1&1 (*??%$!), but I’ve been holding back on doing the upgrade because some of the plugins I use haven’t been validated against WP 3.2. Cant afford for my site to be down, so I might just have to upgrade to another 1&1 package.

Stui

I just got a lengthy but pretty useless reply from 1and1 – basically all they gave me was a link to the php params for my hosting contract. Strangely enough mem_limit=90M for php 4.4.9 and php 5.2.17.

Hi,

I just deactivated every one of my plugins and then did an automatic WordPress install. This time it worked OK. They I reactivated all of my plugins and everything seems to be back the way it was before – working well.

Thanks,
Burt

https://Burt.Better-You.com

Me too – everything went very smoothly!

Thanks for all your help

Steve

Hi, I had the same problem and managed to fix the problem similar to Burt but I just deactivated a number (3) of the bigger plugin’s and managed to upgrade.

PS: I am also a 1 and 1 user…

I checked out the php params on 1&1, and I had 90MB associated with the hosting package, so theoretically that shouldn’t have caused the problem. I ended up by upgrading manually, it worked fine.

stuart