[support] Fed up with Drupal 7 Fatal error: Desperately need help

[John Summerfield]

On 04/04/13 15:08, Roger wrote:
>
>> <snip> My heart just sank into oblivion.
>> I am sooooo sad and fed up with the latest and incessant: Fatal error:
>> Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate
>> 9331811 bytes) in ...... </snip>
> Hi again.
> Ok so I can't create a content type due to Fatal error messages, but
> maybe I can make a view and display that in an existing page or block.
> Problem is I have png images in a number of directories in the
> /defaults/files/images/Seminar database.
> Images are png and jpg.
> I have no idea how to tell a view how to get images from certain
> directories.
> For some reason the view I create gets images only from the /images
> directory and no other. I could not even figure out how to filter on
> directory names.
> If it can be solved how to get only png images from different
> directories  /images/Seminar/2011, /2012, /2013, /2014 file tree this
> would be of great assistance and maybe bail me out temporarily.
>
> Thank you for any assistance, it will be greatly appreciated.
> Roger
>


Unless I were developing Drupal core or modules or themes I'd not touch 
PHP5.4.

The recommended release of PHP for D7 is 5.3, and I'd stay right there 
for hosting.

If you're deploying to Fedora for production, well I know a lot of folk 
do, but I think it's silly for these reasons:
1. Despite what advocates say, Fedora isn't a well-tested product. It's 
built from the latest versions of everything, and while their developers 
say they're stable, in reality they are most likely to contain serious 
bugs. It's not unknown for Fedora kernels to just not boot on some 
hardware, for example If you still think that upstream's claim that 
their software is stable and bug-free, just consider your experience 
with D7, and see how many releases of it there have been.
2. Any release of Fedora won't be around for very long. I think F18 
expires shortly after F20's release, is that right?
3. I have some experiences of broken Fedora systems. Right now, I have 
two F17 systems that won't boot. Well, I did until I deleted one 
yesterday. One is broken because it started out as F7 or thereabouts and 
as it's been upgraded from time to time it seems to have become flakey. 
Dramatic changes to a (non-standard) filesystem layout and replacements 
to init/sysinit didn't help. I'd not want those problems on a production 
money-earning server.

btw Much the same applies to Ubuntu and friends, LongLife editions 
excluded. I use Debian in preference to Ubuntu - _all_ its software is 
supported - although its release cycle is shorter than Red Hat's.

I use and recommend CentOS, CentOS is the latest and will be around for 
years, as long as Red Hat supports RHEL6. Since you're experienced with 
Fedora, I suggest you use CentOS too. CentOS6 has PHP 5.3.3.

I have D7 running (for testing purposes) on several CentOS and Debian 
systems, and have too few problems to make me fed up with it.


Your memory problems could be caused by Drupal or by PHP, but your own 
configuration is the most probable cause, and more so should you test on 
CentOS6 and the latest PHP 5.3.

These days you can easily run up any OS you like (and are licensed for!) 
inside a virtual machine, so running CentOS6 doesn't preclude your use 
of Fedora on your desktop if that's what you prefer.

To find out what your webserver is doing, you can use the strace command.
Something like this:
strace -f -e trace=file \
   $(ps xa | awk '/httpd/ {print "-p " $1}') -o /tmp/apache

"-e" tells strace what system calls to track. Probably, you want 
open,access rather than file.

That should tell you what directories it's accessing.

btw selinux can give grief including stuff magically not working. 
Probably not your memory problems, but it can prevent  httpd from 
accessing files Linux permissions say it can, and it also limits TCP and 
UDP access.