I am very used to clicking the “Save and Continue Editing” button whenever I am in the midst of writing an article for this blog. Even though starting from WordPress version 2.1, it already has the auto-save function which happens in the background, it’s still a good practice to manually save because you might never know when it won’t work.

This happened while I was writing an article just now. Suddenly I got the error message “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 163569 bytes) in /home/…/translator.php on line 0“. At first I thought it was the Translator plugin that was causing the problem. I moved the plugin to another location and still the same error. Later I noticed that I couldn’t get in to any part of Raymond.CC anymore. Forum don’t work, WordPress admin don’t work, not even the blog’s main page!

If all don’t work, it must be a problem on the server side. I did a little searching and luckily I found a solution to fix this problem without submitting a support ticket to my webhost.

The error message “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 163569 bytes)…” indicates that some PHP scripts needed more memory than PHP was allowed.

You can fix the problem by increasing PHP’s memory limit in either way:

1. Try looking for php.ini file on the root of your site. Mine was located in public_html folder.
Open up php.ini file with any text editor and change the values for memory_limit. By default you should see memory_limit = 8M. Try changing it to 12M. If it doesn’t work, increase it to 16M or even 24M if 16M doesn’t work.
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 163569 bytes)

2. If you can’t find the php.ini file, open up the PHP file that requires more memory, and add a line below just after ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ’12M’);
Same thing. Memory can be increased but do try it with 12M first.

3. Final way is to look for .htaccess in your root, and add a line that looks like below.
php_value memory_limit 12M

Good luck in fixing the fatal error allowed memory size error.


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