Blogger Interrupted

There’s nothing like returning home from a wonderful vacation, only to be inundated with all the things you left behind “for later”. I probably picked the worst possible time for launching my first theme, but I don’t regret it because I had quite an unexpected response. For any of you whose emails or requests I have not yet answered - I have not forgotten.

Unfortunately, I had a mess to come home to that was only moments ago sorted out. If the words fatal error: out of memory aren’t enough to strike fear into your blogging heart, I don’t know what is. These are the last words I saw while trying to finish up my weekly Design Notes post, which was scheduled to publish while I was gone. Upon my last edit, however, Wordpress threw an error and I had no time to fix it. In other words, I literally had to make a mad dash for the door before my husband and kids left without me. :)

You know you’re an addict when the above applies to you as well!

Anyway, the problem occurred whenever I tried to save edits to an existing draft, save a new draft, moderate spam, or even edit one of my own comments. This is a very big deal, because it basically renders you helpless. So, I thought I should post on this for anyone who might be encountering the same error, and trying to Google it to find a solution.

If you come across this:

Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 64225280)
 (tried to allocate 5557923 bytes)

Be aware that it may be a problem with your host rather than your database, as you might suspect. While Google did little to provide me with any useful answers, thanks to a great hosting company (Dreamhost) the problem has been resolved.

After looking over the site/server/php configurations, it was suggested by the staffer assisting me that it could be a Wordpress installation problem. This seems unlikely since everything has been working fine for several months now, and I haven’t touched any of the core files where the error was occurring.

Finally they moved me to a new apache service and that did the trick. Obviously, or I wouldn’t be able to post this right? :) Just a word to the wise: I suggest your first course of action if you see this error is to contact your host.

Update: I discovered later this was a problem with a plugin, NOT my database. An outdated version of Google XML Sitemaps was the culprit. Fortunately, with the release of 2.3, Wordpress bloggers will now see notices about plugin updates. :)

Tags: blogging | site