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

Tarek Ezzat picture Tarek Ezzat · Feb 10, 2014 · Viewed 109.1k times · Source

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

Dave Ross picture Dave Ross · Feb 10, 2014

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.