PHP CLI not respecting memory limit in php.ini
- by user13743
I am using drush, which is a command-line php app to manage a drupal website. I am running a command to import a lot of data, which is causing me to hit php's memory limit.
PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 536870912 bytes exhausted ...
Which is 512MB if I'm doing the math correctly (536870912 / 1024 / 1024 = 512). I've changed the directive in the php.ini that drush uses:
$> drush status
...
PHP configuration : /etc/php5/cli/php.ini
$> grep memory /etc/php5/cli/php.ini
; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (128MB)
; http://php.net/memory-limit
memory_limit = 1024M
But I'm still hitting the 512 MB limit! I am running in a virtual machine, whose memory settings I changed from 512 to 1025 MB of RAM to allow drush to run.
$> free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1010 578 431 0 14 392
-/+ buffers/cache: 172 837
Swap: 382 0 382
So it says it has some 431 MB free, now that I've bumped the vm up to 1024. I guess half the memory is being used to run the GUI, but I don't understand how the GUI was running okay when the vm had 512 MB of ram.
Why is the PHP cli still hitting a 512 MB memory limit? If it was hitting a system memory limit, shouldn't it die around 431MB, which is what the free command says is available?
