Php cli memory limit

command-line-interfacecrondebian-squeezePHP

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?

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'.

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