Outdated PHP memory limit in .htaccess

[brendanfalkowski]

Summary (*)

I'd like to open a PR to avoid this issue, and curious if it will be accepted before writing.

The files .htaccess and .htaccess.sample both set php_value memory_limit 756M.

This is below what Magento's install guide suggests (2048M):

• https://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.3/comp-mgr/trouble/cman/out-of-memory.html

As I understand it, Composer does some magic to raise or ignore the memory limit so its operations can complete installing modules.

• https://mage2.pro/t/topic/1045

This does not apply when Magento is serving requests, and keeping 756M fails on a simple user flow:

1. Load the home page (works)
2. Click "create account" (works)
3. Submit the form (fails, out of memory)

I have limited system admin experience, and don't know the implications this change creates. This is a bad developer experience though, and it seems obvious that the recommended default memory limit should actually be used in default config files.

Proposed solution

Change the memory limit in these files to 2048M:

• .htaccess
• .htaccess.sample

This will reflect the documentation, and avoid a bad first experience as a developer.

[m2-assistant]

Hi @brendanfalkowski. Thank you for your report.
To help us process this issue please make sure that you provided the following information:

• Summary of the issue
• Information on your environment
• Steps to reproduce
• Expected and actual results

Please make sure that the issue is reproducible on the vanilla Magento instance following Steps to reproduce. To deploy vanilla Magento instance on our environment, please, add a comment to the issue:

@magento give me 2.3-develop instance - upcoming 2.3.x release

For more details, please, review the Magento Contributor Assistant documentation.

@brendanfalkowski do you confirm that you were able to reproduce the issue on vanilla Magento instance following steps to reproduce?

• yes
• no

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[hostep]

Hi @brendanfalkowski

I can't reproduce your 3rd step on a vanilla installation, even when only running with a memory_limit of 256M.
Are you sure there is no custom code involved which maybe has some memory issues?

The documentation you refer to is some troubleshooting guide for running composer update on the server I believe, this can indeed take a lot of memory and needs swap space available, but in my opinion you shouldn't run composer update on the server where Magento is hosted.

After some discussion on the devdocs repo a while ago, I think the conclusion was that every shop is different and every shop needs to determine its own memory_limit value for what is needed.
You'll notice that there is no recommendation for just running Magento in the docs.

The current 756M is still too high in my opinion, but some shops probably need it somehow...
From own experience: most of the shops we host have the memory_limit set to 256M and this doesn't cause any issues.

Other opinions are welcome, this is just speaking from my own experience :)

[brendanfalkowski]

@hostep — Thanks, there is custom code in the repo I'm working on. I just wasn't expecting it could render but not process a form with the default memory_limit. I have too explore what's causing the higher memory usage.

It seemed like the docs suggested that 2048 MB was recommended:

• https://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.3/install-gde/system-requirements-tech.html

But I see the PHP requirements are specifically different (756 MB):

• https://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.3/install-gde/prereq/php-settings.html

Which matches .htaccess.sample.

[hostep]

The 756M refers to compiling code and deploying static assets. You tend to do using the php command line (which usually uses a different php.ini file and usually has an unlimited memory_limit set).

Currently there is no recommendation for the memory_limit value for serving a Magento shop using a webserver. It depends on how big your shop is, and if it uses specific features which need much memory or not.

In my opinion if you need 2GB of memory simply for creating a single customer account, then there is something fishy in the code. And I hope you can find this problem!

I'm going to close this issue for now if you don't mind 🙂