memory limit - PHP : settings memory_limits > 1024M does not work

Question

For bads reasons I need to set memory_limits higher than 1G for a directory, but on my PHP 5.2.17 on Lenny server when I put for example 2048M I get only the php.ini default value (256M).

PHP run as an apache module, phpinfo give us (for the directory)

memory_limit    1024M   256M
suhosin.memory_limit    0   0

Is there a limitation due to apache module, or PHP conf? I know the server only have 4G of RAM, it's just a special script.

Answer 1

How are you trying to set the memory limit? phpinfo() shows current PHP reserved memory limit, this is what is available due to php.ini having that set as a memory limit

Writing this to Apache .htaccess in your script directory might work, if your server supports setting PHP commands through .htaccess:

php_value memory_limit 2048M

Since it may be possible that .htaccess commands for setting PHP values are turned off. Then you can also try this from PHP code:

ini_set('memory_limit', '2048M');

If this doesn't work and .htaccess also doesn't work, then you need to contact server administrators.