[Mediawiki-l] importImages.php out of memory (jailshell)?

[Daniel Barrett]

I'm having a mysterious problem at my web hosting provider, where maintenance/importImages.php is throwing an "out of memory" exception.  Increasing PHP's memory limits doesn't seem to help.  Has anyone experienced and solved this?

This hosting provider uses cpanel and jailshell.  When I SSH into the system and, in jailshell, run the script, I get:

$  php importImages.php --overwrite ~ /upload
Import Images
Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 7602176) (tried to allocate 7680 bytes) in /home/user/public_html/w/includes/filerepo/LocalFile.php on line 145

Now here's the strange part:

- Hand-editing importImages.php and adding ini_set( 'memory_limit', 'some huge amount' ) makes no difference at all.
- Adding a php.ini files in the current directory makes no difference
- Inside jailshell, on another server in the same farm, I can run the script without error.
- root can run the script without error (not in jailshell) anytime

Any clues?
DanB