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phpfatal-errorphp-gd

Fatal error trying to allocate memory when creating thumbs

I want to share something that happened to me on the way.

I uploaded an image to my website and after that I created some thumbs. Those thumbs where being cropped automatically from relatively big files (jpeg images of about 5mb), and I was doing that lots of times. Suddenly, when uploading a big file and doing a thumb from a cropped image (not the original), I found out this error: 

Fatal error:  Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 22464 bytes)

How could I exhaust 128Mb of memory?

Solution

  • The main problem was I was using more memory than the available. The first thing to check was, of course, if I was uploading a correct file and not one too big. Ok, 3Mb. Then, which was the problem?

    Normally, this kind of error comes with the exact line where it completely depletes your available memory. In my case, was inside this one:

    $orig = imagecreatefromjpeg($fullPathFilename);

    So, the server crashed when allocating a new image into memory. And then, this came to my mind: I didn't free any of the previous allocation calls! As aforementioned, I happened to generate lots of thumbs from multiple sized images. And silly me, I didn't free any of those. So, if you happen to see this error when you crop/resize/alter multiple images, check for this call inside your code:

    imagedestroy($orig);

    So, to sum up.

    If you don't find the imagedestroy() function, then you may have found your problem!