Itty Bitty Applications Only?

Oh, hosting provider. I understand why you want to impose a limit on how much memory PHP applications can use on your servers, but you may be taking it just a little too far:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 64 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 54 bytes)

For the non-programmers out there, that means the application is asking for 54 more bytes of memory to store some information, but is being told it’s already used up the entire 64 bytes available to the entire application.

To put that in context, that error message (having 71 letters, spaces, and punctuation marks) takes up 71 bytes. So 64 bytes isn’t even enough to store a single error message, much less an entire application.

Put another way, when VisiCalc (often described as the “first killer app” for personal computers) came out in 1979, it wouldn’t run on low-end Apple II computers since they had only 16,384 bytes of memory available.

2 thoughts on “Itty Bitty Applications Only?

  1. Mike says:

    It’s time somebody moved to MJJ Designs hosting, where we have memory limits of 4 gigs! Burn up all our memory, we don’t care!

  2. just pixels says:

    Here’s the spec for the first electronic, stored-program computer — the 1948 Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine:

    32-bit word length
    Serial binary arithmetic using 2’s complement integers
    A single address format order code
    A random access main store of 32 words, extendable up to 8192 words
    A computing speed of around 1.2 milliseconds per instruction

    The builders wrote a program to calculate the largest factor of 2^18. Though obviously not in PHP.

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