Out of memory errors when running composer

[byrond]

Trying to run 'composer require...' or 'composer update' within the-vagrant (via vagrant ssh) gives the following error:

PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 1073741824 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 32 bytes) in phar:///usr/local/bin/composer/src/Composer/DependencyResolver/RuleWatchGraph.php on line 52

Checked the /etc/php5/cli/php.ini, and 'memory_limit = -1' is present, but I suspect the setting isn't taking effect. Running the following gives a result of '256M':

php -r "echo ini_get('memory_limit').PHP_EOL;"

Adding the memory_limit setting on the command line allows 'composer update' to succeed. For example:

php -d memory_limit=-1 /usr/local/bin/composer update

(See also https://getcomposer.org/doc/articles/troubleshooting.md#memory-limit-errors)

[byrond]

Running php --ini gives the following output:

Configuration File (php.ini) Path: /etc/php/5.6/cli
Loaded Configuration File:         /etc/php/5.6/cli/php.ini

Recommend updating the-vagrant/conf/vagrant/provisioning/roles/php/tasks/main.yml to not set the 256M memory_limit in cli/php.ini or set it to '-1' separately.

[becw]

I haven't encountered this recently, I think because more recent versions of Composer + more recent versions of PHP are more efficient in this way.

When I have run into this, there are a couple of things that have worked for me:

• Make sure XDebug is disabled on the CLI
• Update composer (try sudo -H composer self-update)
• Increase the memory limit for the CLI specifically
• ... and, as you mentioned: verifying the php.ini file for the version of PHP you're running. The default PHP config location changed when the PHP 7 packages were standardized, so that all paths include the version number as its own path component. Several things in the-vagrant have referred to the wrong path over time.