The WGBH.org Development Blog

As you regular readers know, we’ve been struggling with a little memory problem here as of late. Basically, under several different circumstances, PHP would quit and tell us it had used up all of its allocated memory, which we had jacked all the way up to 512MB.

At first, I suspected it was due to some server configuration issues, since we had just built an entirely new environment from the ground up. After a while we figured out it was definitely a code issue, and possibly more than one. After examining our own code, poking around contributed module code and some trial and error, I hadn’t been able to pinpoint the problem. Things were starting to look … worrisome.

But, as they say, it’s always darkest before the dawn for the other day what to my wondering eyes should appear but a comment on this blog from Moshe Weitzman. Moshe is one of the original Drupal developers and remains one the key core and contributed module maintainers to this day. Apparently, he is also a local resident and WGBH fan.

He’s also a very nice guy.

Moshe had discovered this blog and offered up his considerable help. Right away he fixed a memory leak in the Devel module and released a new version, which solved our problem of sometimes running out of memory when invoking the theme editor.

But he wasn’t done helping us with just that tidbit. Oh me oh my no.

I gave him a rundown on our problem of running out of memory when doing our nightly TV schedule data import and he was able top quickly suggest some possible culprits. Sure enough, after some tinkering around, I found that the problem went away when I disabled the Pathauto and Token modules. I tinkered with the FeedAPI cron function to disable these modules at the start and reenable them at the end of the process. As a result, memory usage during the import of our schedule data dropped by ten-fold.

Whew!

This fix, however, did introduce one new wrinkle: we used the Pathauto module to set URL aliases for new TV program and episode nodes that are created during the nightly import. By disabling Pathauto, I then had to write my own bit of code to set these aliases during import. Not a huge deal and, really, quite a small price to pay.

The bottom line of all this is that I am now sleeping just a little bit better each night and we’ve been able to ratchet down the maximum amount of memory assigned to PHP from 512MB to 128MB.

Thanks again, Moshe!