PHP memory limit being hit

[MKnight]

We have an ongoing problem that seems to be creeping up more often than it should.

Every couple of months we stop receiving responses to tickets in Kayako do to a PHP file memory limit. our IT team keeps upping the memory limit but it at some point reaches it then all email gets stuck in the mail queue.

Here is the latest error message we have:

PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 20971520 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 1647109 bytes) in /home/httpd/sites/com/marketingtips/support/kb/includes/MIME/mimeDecode.php on line 324


We are running the latest STABLE build of Kayako (3.30.02)

Can anyone shed some light on this?

[Jamie Edwards]

Hi there,

20971520 bytes is only 20 Megabytes in size. Under normal circumstances, we would strongly advice any moderately used support desk to set a memory limit well above this (to pick a number from the air, 100MB).

The usual reason why PHP hits the memory limit when downloading e-mail is down to large attachments, or simply large e-mail bodies.

You could say that the PHP memory limit should at least be as large as the e-mails the support desk is processing.

However, this would be a severe underestimate because PHP will be using memory elsewhere: such as serving support desk pages and requests to others, or if you run other PHP scripts on the same server, those scripts will also be sharing that memory allocation.

In any case, a 20MB memory limit for PHP is too low.

Hope this helps,

[Jamie Edwards]

(tried to allocate 1647109 bytes) in /home/httpd/sites/com/marketingtips/support/kb/includes/MIME/mimeDecode.php

This bit indicates the the e-mail being processed is only 1647109 bytes (~ 1.5MB). As you can see, PHP is (without processing other messages) using a substantial amount of the PHP memory allocation.

[Casey Rousseau]

I'd also suggest checking your queue mailbox with another client to be sure there aren't any email messages that are corrupt/too large for eSupport to parse. eSupport expects that the only messages that will be in the box at any time are new ones, so it tries to parse everything every time through, even if there are messages that it can't handle.

[evgeny]

I had the same issue, when sending attachments with size > 1 Mb caused mail parser to fail with memory limit error. Increasing memory_limit in .htaccess didn't work, and I can't change it in php.ini, since the hoster does not allow it.

We were able to resolve the issue by inserting the following line in the beginning of /cli/index.php file:

ini_set('memory_limit', '128M');

This increases memory_limit on per-script level. It worked for me, maybe it will be helpful for someone.