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Comment by martin_ | Hacker News Reader

Setting a 1gb memory limit is a great way to hide the problem and dramatically reduce the maximum number of concurrent requests to your website, and drain resources from any other services running on the box(es).

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Being massively pedantic for a moment; he didn't set the memory limit to 1GB but instead to 0.9765625GB:

    <?php
        ini_set('memory_limit', '1000M'); // or you could use 1G
    ?>

Joking aside, do most people these days just use MB (1000^n) instead of MiB (1024^n) when working with RAM? Is this now the standard way to calculating memory?

Good call. Minor oversight. Just updated that. I think if your NOT a hardcore technologist you probably think of megabytes as as 1000^n. It's really easy to forget too for the rest of us.

Über-pedantry: It's "you're" and not "your".

Unfortunately, HN doesn't have an edit function for comments. ;)

It does, but only for comments that haven't been replied to

More pedantry ;)

I was actually trying to be helpful there :(

Hehe. Based on the previous pendantry, it blended in. I'll take it as help then. :D

The previous pedantry wasn't me though; only the MiB / MB comment. And that was partly out of curiosity if 1000MB == 1GB was a deliberate rounding.

Increasing the memory limit is only temporary. It's used as a debugging procedure. I later write "If by increasing the memory limit you have gotten rid of the error and your code now works, you’ll need to take measures to decrease that memory usage" with a list of things to do to decrease memory usage.

Sorry I missed that section. Carry on!

Unless you need the limit to be that high. But I agree that it isn't ideal. However, PHP cleans up nicely once the process ends, and manually freeing memory space can slow PHP down. The only exception I would take to this, I believe, are resources. If is_resource($foo) returns true, you should probably free it (looking at you, JpGraph)

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