[RESOLVED] memory_limit problems

[perpetualshaun]

I have programmed a mailing list script can generate a mailing list that pulls names from four tables: leads, contacts, accounts, and warranties. Each these tables has THOUSANDS of records, and when I do a search for the one market segment I expect that it would find over 60K matches, where it's writing a string of about 40 columns for each match.

I programmed it to just continue writing the spreadsheet data to a variable in PHP, and then when it's finished write to the .csv file on the server. Well, I keep getting an error message like this:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted at (null):0 (tried to allocate 1 bytes) in /home/virtual/site3/fst/var/www/html/lms/manage/mailing_list.php on line 260

I have an ini_set in there (ini_set("memory_limit","524288000")😉 which should be overriding the default and setting it to 500M. But the byte limit that it's reporting in that previous error message is only 32MB. How is that?

We are running PHP 4.4.4 on this server, and sadly upgrading to PHP 5 is probably NOT an option. Does anyone have any ideas of other things I can try?

[sneakyimp]

Your server might be in safe mode.

You also might want to see what your call to ini_set() returns. According to the docs, it should return FALSE on failure, and the old value on success. If it's returning FALSE then your ini_set isn't working.

Most importantly, that's a lot of memory to be using. Seems to me you should rework your code to write the CSV one line at a time and avoid the memory problem altogether.

[bradgrafelman]

As sneakyimp suggested, you should try writing the data directly to disk as you retrieve it, rather than letting it get bottled up in memory.