How to solve: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of XXX bytes exhausted (tried to allocate XXX bytes)

There is not enough memory to run your script. PHP has reached the memory limit and stops executing it. This error is fatal, the script stops. The value of the memory limit can be configured either in the php.ini file or by using ini_set('memory_limit', '128 M'); in the script (which will overwrite the value defined in php.ini). The purpose of the memory limit is to prevent a single PHP script from gobbling up all the available memory and bringing the whole web server down.

The first thing to do is to minimise the amount of memory your script needs. For instance, if you're reading a large file into a variable or are fetching many records from a database and are storing them all in an array, that may use a lot of memory. Change your code to instead read the file line by line or fetch database records one at a time without storing them all in memory. This does require a bit of a conceptual awareness of what's going on behind the scenes and when data is stored in memory vs. elsewhere.

If this error occurred when your script was not doing memory-intensive work, you need to check your code to see whether there is a memory leak. The memory_get_usage function is your friend.