Why are PHP memory limits important to your website development journey? PHP is a famous backend technology that is used by many tech giants for supporting their applications. PHP gives many advanced features for making web pages dynamic and integrating some features you can not simply get using javascript, HTML, and CSS.
Whenever you set up a new PHP project, some memory is allocated automatically. This memory is mostly suitable for general applications. But there are some cases, for example when you are loading some heavy images when your website is using high graphics then you get some errors like -
What is the PHP memory limit?
PHP memory limit is per script memory allotted to the PHP script. It is the same as the storage limit a particular task can occupy. This memory limit in PHP scripts is useful in some cases. For example, there can be cases when some poorly written code tries to eat up all the memory in the stack.
Most WordPress websites have a memory limit of 32M, but you may require more memory in many cases. For example, if you are doing heavy operations like recurring calls to the database and heavy image processing, you need to increase the memory limit of your script.
Strategies to Consider
In this part of the blog, we will share various ways to increase the memory limits of your PHP scripts/apps. While these are not the only ways to increase the memory limits of your PHP script, these are the ideal steps that most developers use for memory limit issues.
Also, changing the memory limit of an app can create problems sometimes, so you should always back up the data of your system.
Before trying to increase memory, you should always talk to the server providers of your website. They can help you increase the memory limit using their best practices.
Strategy 1: Edit the PHP.ini File
The php.ini file is executed every time a PHP application runs, and it’s used for controlling the various settings of PHP script like maximum upload size, memory limit, timeout limit, etc.
To increase the memory limit, you can change the following variables. But beware, these variables are case sensitive, and you need to restart the server after doing changes for them to be reflected.
memory_limit = 256M
upload_max_filesize = 12M
post_max_size = 13M
file_uploads = On
max_execution_time = 180