[development] Why does Drupal require so much memory?

[Earl Miles]

Graeme McKibbin wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm getting the following error on a site,
> "*Fatal error:* Allowed memory size of 20971520 bytes exhausted (tried 
> to allocate 1077617 bytes) 
> in...sites/all/modules/views-5.x-1.6/views_cache.inc on line 146"
> 
> The site basically has a content type with many computed and other 
> fields, but no images or large files etc. So I'm wondering why it 
> requires so much memory. I presume it's something to do with caching?
> 
> I'd asked the host to increase the max packets allowed and they made it 
> 20M, but that still doesn't work. So I've requested it to be increased 
> to 32M. But I'm concerned that in the future, I'll run into the same 
> problem. 
> Is there another a way to fix this?

There's a bug in Views that causes it to cache too much data with 
taxonomy; there are also other modules that can really abuse the Views 
cache, which can cause it to load a ton of data. (vote_up_down is 
particularly heinous about it, but only because it uses a votingapi 
module API in a way that is incorrect).

Views uses a fair bit of memory; it takes a bunch of data to adequately 
describe your database so that it can build queries.