Fatal Error: Allowed Memory Size of 134217728 Bytes Exhausted (CodeIgniter + XML-RPC)

Question

I have a bunch of client point of sale (POS) systems that periodically send new sales data to one centralized database, which stores the data into one big database for report generation.

The client POS is based on PHPPOS, and I have implemented a module that uses the standard XML-RPC library to send sales data to the service. The server system is built on CodeIgniter, and uses the XML-RPC and XML-RPCS libraries for the webservice component. Whenever I send a lot of sales data (as little as 50 rows from the sales table, and individual rows from sales_items pertaining to each item within the sale) I get the following error:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 54 bytes) 

128M is the default value in php.ini, but I assume that is a huge number to break. In fact, I have even tried setting this value to 1024M, and all it does is take a longer time to error out.

As for steps I've taken, I've tried disabling all processing on the server-side, and have rigged it to return a canned response regardless of the input. However, I believe the problem lies in the actual sending of the data. I've even tried disabling the maximum script execution time for PHP, and it still errors out.

Answer 1

Changing the memory_limit by ini_set('memory_limit', '-1'); is not a proper solution. Please don't do that.

Your PHP code may have a memory leak somewhere and you are telling the server to just use all the memory that it wants. You wouldn't have fixed the problem at all. If you monitor your server, you will see that it is now probably using up most of the RAM and even swapping to disk.

You should probably try to track down the offending code in your code and fix it.

Answer 2

ini_set('memory_limit', '-1'); overrides the default PHP memory limit.