Error with database Backup – Memory Limit (#3)

Hi,
I too am running WordPress under IONOS shared hosting and have also started receiving a similar error today, “ERROR: Allowed memory size of 117440512 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2994360 bytes)“, only when backing up the database.

I’m running WordPress 6.7 under PHP 7.4 and, yes, I know that’s unsupported but we can’t update it yet due to the theme we’re running and a site redesign is in the pipeline at which point it’ll get zapped. But I digress.

Anyway, I’ve read both of the following topics:
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/error-with-database-backup-memory-limit/

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/error-with-database-backup-memory-limit-2/

and having set the wp_memory_limit first to 512M then 1024M, I was still getting the error, despite PHPinfo reporting that the limits appeared to be recognised and the wp_max_memory_limit was set to -1.

So I took a tangental approach and examined the database tables. I discovered that the two biggest tables were wp_wffilechanges and wp_wffilemods, both owned by Wordfence. When I looked those up, I found this post:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/table-wp_wffilemods/

So I truncated both tables and the error disappeared.

Takeaway: If you have Wordfence installed, it may be the culprit inasmuch as it’s precipitating the problem and truncating those tables is a workaround, but it does look like there’s something weird going on with the memory handling in either IONOS’ shared hosting, PHP, WordPress or BackWPup, and experience leads me to want to put my money on the first one in the list. ??

• This topic was modified 1 week ago by lokash.
• This topic was modified 1 week ago by lokash.
• This topic was modified 1 week ago by lokash.
• This topic was modified 1 week ago by lokash.
• This topic was modified 1 week ago by lokash.
• This topic was modified 1 week ago by lokash.