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Accepted
Ryan H
Asked: 2011-07-30 09:15:22 +0800 CST

php cli memory limit

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I am getting a memory error in a php cron job:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 67108864 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 71 bytes) in /opt/matrix/core/lib/DAL/DAL.inc on line 830

The applicable parts of the crontab are:

$ sudo crontab -u www-data -l
MAILTO=root
# m h  dom mon dow   command
*/15 * * * * php /opt/matrix/core/cron/run.php /opt/matrix

I am running on Debian Squeeze, fully updated.

The obvious solution would be that the cli has a low memory limit (of 64MB). However, /etc/php5/cli/php.ini says it's unlimited.

$ cat /etc/php5/cli/php.ini | grep memory_limit
memory_limit = -1

I read somewhere that it could be different for different users, and since the process is running as www-data, i ran:

$ sudo -u www-data -s
$ php -i | grep memory_limit
memory_limit => -1 => -1
suhosin.memory_limit => 0 => 0

Even the apache/php.ini has a higher limit than the error is claiming:

$ sudo cat /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini | grep memory_limit
memory_limit = 128M

What am I missing? Where is this memory limit?

php cron command-line-interface debian-squeeze

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    IIRC, an unlimited memory_limit isn't supported by the CLI (I'll try to find a source for this) but for now, try passing it into the command:

    php -d memory_limit=128M my_script.php

    UPDATE

    Apparently I was dreaming about the unlimited memory_limit not being supported for php cli. Regardless, it looks like the value from the ini is ignored. The simplest solution should then be to specifically set it in the php command calling the script.

    UPDATE2

    To answer the question of where the memory limit is coming from, it's most likely being set in the script itself using 'ini_set'.

    • 127

  2. While testing a CLI php version 5.5.9 it appears that in cli it has unlmited memory limit by default, and specifying php -d memory_limit=4G my_script.php will set a limitation to that.

    • 2

  3. If you install PHP as an Apache module (check 'Server API' in phpinfo()), you should calling it via command line web browser (wget, curl, lynx, ...) in cron job, something like this:

    */15 * * * * lynx -dump http://localhost/script.php >> /var/log/script.log 2>&1
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