[Mediawiki-l] parser allocation error message

[Rob Church]

On 07/08/07, Dave Sigafoos <davesigafoos at sanmar.com> wrote:
> Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 16777216 bytes exhausted (tried to
> allocate 199809 bytes) in /home/wiki/wikiSanMar/includes/Parser.php on
> line 968
>
> This happened after creating/editing 9 new documents.  Mostly tables
> ranging form 12 columns x 20 rows to 12 columns x 500 rows
>
> Ideas why and how to prevent in the future would be welcomed

Large documents, perhaps? Parsing is one of our most intensive
(resources, time) operations, consisting of a large number of regular
expressions working in some sort of organised chaos; a haphazard
harmony of edge cases, so it's quite plausible that parsing a large
amount of wiki text can lead to memory limit exhaustion if you're
doing a large page with a lowish limit.

There is a stone tablet somewhere in Santa Ana, which states that a
man shall go insane before he truly understands the way of the Parser.


Rob Church