phpunit memory_limit parameter does not apply

Question

I've just installed phpunit via pear in a mac osx 10.7 and everything works fine except I got memory limit errors (xdebug enabled for reports).

I tried to add the -d memory_limit=512M parameter to phpunit but it is not applying because, on the very first error, I added var_dump(ini_get('memory_limit')); exit; and it prints string(3) "32M"

So, why is it not being applied?

Besides that, if I run

php -d memory_limit=256M -r "echo ini_get('memory_limit');" 

it echoes "256M"

Is it possible that phpunit is not executing same php?

Answer 1

Yes you can set every php option with phpunit -d that can be set with ini_set.

You already opened a bug over in the phpunit bug tracker but well I'm going for the more verbose answer here

Reproduce to show it works in general:

echo "<?php var_dump(ini_get('memory_limit')); " > foo.php  phpunit -d memory_limit=12M --bootstrap foo.php  

Produces:

string(3) "12M" PHPUnit 3.6.5 by Sebastian Bergmann. 

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But phpunit only applies this option once before the first test is run!

So chances are your code is somewhere changing the memory limit back to 32M which is something phpunit can't "fix".

Same goes for setting the memory limit in the phpunit.xml file.