White Screen of Death when I INCREASE ram

  • Resolved vikingjs

    (@vikingjs)


    10 years, 6 months ago

    Upgraded to 3.9.1, but I had to disable JetPack because I ran out of RAM.

    The Apache error logs indicated I had 48MB of available memory – odd, since php.ini was set to 128. I increased that to 256 and not surprisingly it had no effect.

    After some digging I found that WordPress overrides that setting. I edited wp-config.php and bumped up the WP_MEMORY_LIMIT. That completely broke the site, without writing anything to the apache logs. I put it back to 48, and without JetPack things worked fine. I set it to 49MB, and got white screen.

    I tried some more settings, everywhere from 128 to 32, and the rule was hard and fast: WP_MEMORY_LIMIT > 48MB -> Total fail.

    I double-extra confirmed that php.ini was set to a roomy 256MB:

    $ php -i | grep memory
    memory_limit => 256M => 256M

    So, what the heck? I’ve never seen anything like this before.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • I’m not too sure that it’s the actual setting that’s causing the problem. It sounds like when you’re editing the wp-config.php file, it’s producing a PHP fatal error that’s taking down the site. What tool are you using to make the edit?

    Thread Starter vikingjs

    (@vikingjs)

    vim, and note that when I change the value to less than 48M using the same tool, the site does not break.

    Weird, huh?

    Thread Starter vikingjs

    (@vikingjs)

    D’oh! .htaccess had a php_value directive, from back when I was on a virtual server with limited RAM and I was tweaking the mem limits for each site I had running there.

    Now it’s been so long since I’ve even used an htaccess file I forgot that this blog had one. Generally I set all that stuff in my vhosts for better security and performance. But not for this one dang site.

    Anyway, thanks for the help. All is well once again.

    Cool. +1 for Vim. ??

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • The topic ‘White Screen of Death when I INCREASE ram’ is closed to new replies.