Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 30720 bytes)

Initially, I thought this may be because of some plugin included in Buddy press and tried to uninstall it and then install again then realized that it may be because some extra configuration required.

I googled the error and found that this is because of configured memory which is less than what is required required at the time of activation of buddy press. I assume this may be because of the fact that buddy press conatin many plugins with in itself. Any other complex or bigger plugin can also produce the same error.

Solution: Many people suggested on different blogs and forums that setting memory size at wp-config.php can solve this problem but most of them it was not working easily. I think it will also dependent on different types of environments. Some people also suggested to talk to hosting service so that they can configure the php settings accordingly.

I tried to do the same and checked if my hosting service allows me to change php configurations or not. I found php.ini file in my home directory, and after changing the following parameter, i was able to activate buddy press successfully.

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; Resource Limits ;
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

max_execution_time = 30     ; Maximum execution time of each script, in seconds
max_input_time = 60     ; Maximum amount of time each script may spend parsing request data
memory_limit = 64M      ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (8MB)

I increased the memory_limit from 32M to 64M to resolve my issue.

I think this error may come for every memory intensive job. So you can adjust your php memory configuration accordingly.

What has happened: WordPress released a critical update on 29th of December and I missed that. In next couple of days, I received an email from my hosting company that my site is getting used for phishing attack and domain name has been disabled by them.

How I got out of this: I have been asked to check each and every file to make sure that I had removed all the malicious content from it and then only they enabled the domain. It took me couple of days and in the mean time www.techiegyan.com was not available to users.

My Apologies to users, who could not search content of this website during that duration.

One very probable scenario is that during the maintenance processes some thing is missed on some server(s). This may cause random issues to the user of the application as requests are distributed and can reach any server.This trick can be used to figure out which server is serving your page. Here i am adding the code which we used recently in our JSP pages to figure it out.

<%@page import="java.net.InetAddress;" %>
<%String ip = "";
  String hostName = "";
try{
    InetAddress inetAddress = InetAddress.getLocalHost();
    ip = inetAddress.getHostAddress();
	hostName = inetAddress.getHostName();
}catch(Exception e){}
%>
<div style="display:none;"> Server IP address : <%out.print(ip);%> <br/>
Server Host Name : <%out.print(hostName);%> <br/>
</div>

As you do not want to show this to user, you can add a hidden div element at the end of the page which can contain server address and server name by which you can differentiate servers. This can be accessed by viewing the page source (most of the browsers provide this option on right-click.)