"Fatal error: Allowed memory size of xyz bytes exhausted"

On the Wordfence options page, you can try increasing “How much memory should Wordfence request when scanning” to 256, if it is not already that high. If it is, your host may limit your memory below that amount.

Some hosts will raise the limit if you ask — unless you have other plugins that are using a lot of memory, it is probably only during the scans that this is happening, once per day, but the message can stay in the box at the top of Wordfence pages until something else replaces it.

If you are using a caching plugin, you can try clearing the cache and running a scan manually — if that scan runs successfully, I can help you exclude the cache from scans, to make it complete without using as much memory. This isn’t ideal, but it can help scans complete fully.

-Matt R

I did just as you suggested, and looks like the manually requested scan is scheduled for a couple hours from now.
I’ll re-post when completed.

Oh, and this same issue popped up today on another one of our sites.

I did confirm that WF is already requesting 256MB on both installations.

Ran scan after clearing cache.
Same results.
Throws “memory exhausted” error

Ok, sorry it doesn’t help — I think in this case, you will need the host to raise the limit, if they will.

Many sites run fine with lower limits, but it depends on the content on the site, including plugins, posts, images, comments and so on. Most hosts do seem ok with raising the limit, and it may help to mention that the higher limit is needed only for a daily security scan, and the site won’t use that much memory on every pageview.

-Matt R

Thanks.
I’ll check into that

Ok, let us know how it goes. If the host won’t raise the limit, we could try disabling a couple of the scans, but that generally isn’t ideal.

-Matt R

I have been getting this error. Started at 250mg memory allowance when scanning, now at 950mg and it still fails. I can run it on other sites with no problem, but just one of the sites seems to trip it up, I have run it on larger sites with much less memory and it has run. Not sure what to do, have tried clearing cache etc. I have uninstalled and reinstalled and it has loaded it back in, even with a site clear it must have had information still retained in the WP database?

Not sure what the next step is.

I can ‘third’ this issue.

It is quite odd, but something is up. I am not even using Live Traffic (though tried toggling it on/off), but on that page I get continuous fatal errors about the memory amount.

SO I reconfigured the server to give it ALL THAT memory and still issues.

The most recent request for memory allocation fails still.

What’s up?

• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by bitsum.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by bitsum.