0 minutes, 42 seconds
So, we all know that in PHP, you configure it with a php.ini file. And in there, you can set the amount of RAM a script can use with the memory_limitsetting (remember this is “M” not “MB”!). And if you get this error:
PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 234881025 bytes)
Then you can increase the memory_limit to be larger (don’t forget to restart apache!). However, what if you want a script to hit that limit to see how your error logs and such are set up? I had more fun than I thought I would writing a textbook solution to a textbook problem. Here it is in it’s 4 line glory:
$str = 'memory!';
$i = 1;
while ($i++ != 100) $str .= $str ;
print "done!";
When you run this you should see an error as this will exceed 128M of memory. If not, so salt to taste ($i++ != 200) if you run with a higher memory_limit setting!