"tl;dr" posts bring seemingly "harmless" error messages

[Third Spanish States]

I was reposting/backing up one of my RPs into these forums, and although there have been no actual problems with the act of posting them, every time I posted something with some large wordcount, an error message like this appeared, although the post seemingly was sent unscathed despite it. Just reporting in case it may be important, as it seems to be related to the Search function of this new forum:

Code: Select all

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 16777216 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 71 bytes) in /home/nation/phpBB3/includes/search/fulltext_native.php on line 1112

[Scolopendra]

Does it have any unusual characters in it? We've seen a problem like this, but it was due to non-English characters.

[Third Spanish States]

Some of the words and names used have non-English punctuation, I suppose that explains it then.

[Scolopendra]

According to here the character limit per post is 60,000. Compare to the 4 million characters in the meterstick of data, a KJV edition of the Bible.

[The Most Glorious Hack]

But, for what it's worth, I believe the Jolt limit is 50k.

[Bluth Corporation]

None of these address the issue, which is with PHP trying to allocate more memory than it is configured to allow.

This has nothing to do with the length of the post, and everything to do with how much memory PHP was already using before it started processing the post. If processing the post requires allocating so much memory that, when added to that already in use, causes PHP to go over its limit, the aforementioned error will result. To be sure, longer posts are probably more likely to cause this, but a single-character post could cause it if PHP was already bumping up against its limit (remember, the amount of memory that needs to be allocated for all the programmatic work of adding the post, updating the thread, etc. is considerably more than that needed to just store the content of the post itself).

[Erastide]

I get that error with the Player Profile thread. But everytime I go and look, it's actually gone through. So I don't worry about it anymore.

[[violet]]

This has nothing to do with the length of the post, and everything to do with how much memory PHP was already using before it started processing the post. If processing the post requires allocating so much memory that, when added to that already in use, causes PHP to go over its limit, the aforementioned error will result. To be sure, longer posts are probably more likely to cause this, but a single-character post could cause it if PHP was already bumping up against its limit (remember, the amount of memory that needs to be allocated for all the programmatic work of adding the post, updating the thread, etc. is considerably more than that needed to just store the content of the post itself).

Spoken like somebody who knows what they're talking about! Now tell me how to fix it.

[Bluth Corporation]

Well, do you have the permissions necessary to make changes to PHP's configuration file?

[[violet]]

Yes.

[Bluth Corporation]

Alright, the fix is to increase the value of the memory_limit configuration setting in php.ini. You may have to experiment to find the range of values that eliminate errors without impacting performance or the server's ability to handle simultaneous connections.

This isn't without drawbacks, though--set it too high, and one buggy PHP script (or malicious user) can easily tie up all the memory on the system.

[[violet]]

Thanks Bluth! Should be fixed now.