tried to allocate 4096 bytes) in /var/www/vhosts/rede.ca/httpdocs/wp-includes/

Question

I upgraded from WordPress 4.9.6 to 6.3 and initially everything seemed fine.

I installed the latest version of the X theme (by Themeco) with no issue.

But when I applied my old X child theme the site has crashed. The admin panel will not load, even Recovery Mode doesn't work.

I have subsequently removed all plugins and themes (except for twentytwentythree).

Nevertheless, I keep getting variations of this error in my Apache logs:

mod_fcgid: stderr: PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 1073741824 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 4096 bytes)

Out of desperation I have successfully increased the amount of memory available to 256M, then 512M and finally 1024M.

But no matter how much memory I allocate, the "tried to allocate" amount is always tiny: either 4096, 8192, or 20480 bytes.

Added to wp-config:

define( 'WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '1024M' );

And php.ini:

memory_limit = 1024M

I have tried different versions of PHP from 7.4.33 to 8.1.23, and switching between FastCGI and FPM.

I found this comment on StackOverflow that seems to describe my situation, but I have no idea what the next step should be.

My guess is infinite recursion tried to allocate 8192 bytes typically when this is a low value that is the reason. If you up the memory above that amount and it still happens, then that's another marker for it.

PHP 8.0.30 | WordPress 6.3 | CentOS 7.9.2009

Answer 1

Maybe this will help someone one day.

I turned out my theme was somehow still active, even though I had renamed its directory.

Now that I am actually running the default WP theme I can log into the admin panel.