iThemes Issue Resurfaces After Latest Update

Loaded iThemes about 6 months ago as a result of seeing a lot of nefarious hits on my site. My hosting provider (Dreamhost) recommended iThemes security to provide piece of mind as they believe it is a good product.

Initially was happy with the product and was about to spend $$ for the Pro version, then an update intermittently broke the platform with memory errors (don’t remember the version number). After a good deal of debugging I was able to determine that it was directly related iThemes and worked to increase my memory allocation to 256 MB in .htaaccess, php.ini and one other file which I currently forget. None of this fixed anything.

After about 3 updates to iThemes, the issue was fixed. My trust was shaken, but things seemed to be going OK, and as I warmed up to the platform and it built credibility to where I might buy pro, again it happened. This most recent update to version 5.3.5 gives me the frequent (but still intermittent) error:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 72 bytes) in /home/dlpod/detroitlionspodcast.com/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 2347

The timing was directly correlated with the update to version 5.3.5 and is quite frustrating. I can’t run the software now because I will intermittently throw errors at my users, and when trying to build a community of users, the worst thing that can happen is page errors.

I certainly hope this gets fixed again, and the developers understand where the issue is so that they don’t continue to create this problem. It isn’t the host, or traffic or anything else. Its happened twice, and both times with an update. One time it was fixed with an update. These types of issues make building credibility quite difficult, which in turn makes spending money on this product quite difficult. I really want to like it, it was great while it worked. I just don’t trust it.

What can I be told about fixing/debugging this other than contact my hosting provider?