Cannot Allocate Memory Error

[itwasntme]

I'm getting the following error in cPanel's error log:

[Wed Oct 24 07:59:10 2007] [error] [client 66.249.72.162] (12)Cannot allocate memory: couldn't create child process: /opt/suphp/sbin/suphp for /home//public_html/index.php

It's been happening every day for the last few days at about the same time, and the site goes down for a while before recovering. It has also happened twice in the afternoon over the past several days. My client is going nuts because they thought moving to a VPS would solve all our problems.

Yesterday, after talking to tech support, I made the following changes to php.ini:

memory_limit = 256M
max_execution_time = 300

That doubled the memory and the execution time, but this morning, as you can see by the date in the error above, I got the same error.

Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to reproduce the error myself.

I spoke to Hostican again today, and on their advice I restarted Apache just now. The person I spoke to suggested that I consider reverting to an earlier version of PHP (I have 5.2.4) and/or setting up a cron job to restart Apache each morning. He also suggested I post here.

I did a WhoIs on the IP for the error above and it was Google. Kind of interesting, maybe if Google is crawling the site every morning at the same time that would explain the timing, anyway. I don't know if Google has been the culprit each time, though.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can troubleshoot this further or steps I can take to prevent it from happening? Should I go with an earlier version of PHP? Set up a cron job to restart Apache?

I usually try one thing at a time to try to identify what works, so the order to try things in is another question, and since I restarted Apache today, maybe I should give it a day to see if it happens tomorrow?

[chopper]

I had a load of problems with php 5.2.4 Im curently running php 5.2.3. I have not hada problem since. So try to downgrade php. What version of apache you running?

[itwasntme]

What kind of problems were you having with PHP 5.2.4? Were you getting any "cannot allocate memory" errors?

I'm running Apache 2.2.6.

[chopper]

Yep Samething among others.

[itwasntme]

Thanks for the quick reply.

I guess reverting to PHP 5.2.3 is the way to go. I would like to wait to see if the restart of Apache does the trick, but I'm thinking it's less likely to be the fix than going with the earlier version of PHP based on your experience and what Hostican told me earlier today.

Can I do the reversion to 5.2.3 myself, or is that a support ticket thing?

[chopper]

You can do it yourself. through WHM.

[itwasntme]

Cool. I haven't got a clue how to do it, so I'll post another thread asking for some instructions. I'll bet others can use them, too.

Thanks for your help.

[lnxcode]

We always recommend sticking about a version behind the latest, as with the latest we find more and more common bugs like this one... where stuff doesn't work. Thanks for the help on this one chopper and itwasntme - this will help others too.

[itwasntme]

Well, Hostican downgraded PHP to version 5.2.2 as CGI, and unfortunately, I still got a bunch of 500 errors this am and another "Cannot allocate memory".

So here's a summary of what has been tried so far:

1. Increase memory_limit to 256M and max_execution_time to 300.
2. Restart Apache.
3. Downgrade from PHP 5.2.4 to 5.2.2.

I am at a loss as to what else to do to solve this. Any ideas?

[lnxcode]

Hey

I know that you where asking how to do it before (PHP as CGI) so here is a url link too:
http://forum.hostican.com/virtual-pr...r-php-cgi.html

When you restart apache does it fix the issue?