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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!
$foo = str_pad(”, ini_get(‘memory_limit’));
Oh, awesome! Assign a variable that is the size of
memory_limitand it will inherently exceed that size. Neat!However, When I run it in a full LAMP stack, I get an error:
PHP Error 8:Message:
A non well formed numeric value encountered
in /vagrant/application/views/_layout/header.php:1
Oh yah, derp, because you can use shorthand notation like ‘128M’ and that’s what gets returned literally by ini_get(). No conversion is done for you.
I initially misremebered there being a built-in to convert, but I must have been remembering the discussion here: http://php.net/manual/en/function.ini-get.php#refsect1-function.ini-get-examples
So, easy enough to use ini_get(‘memory_limit’) but not as easy to one-liner. Also memory_limit has a special value of -1 for unlimited that should be handled (in that case you’d want to get the total memory installed on the server and pad a string that far? :)
This would be better as a little module: https://gist.github.com/firebus/2e324b1261f0e2cbe1f9
I’m afraid to run it with memory_limit set to -1…
Totally cool. I love the deep dive! Bonus points for the gist ;)