Odd WordPress memory_limit issue

Hi everyone,

I’m helping a friend with a WordPress site (hosted on a Cpanel/WHM server) and he’s having an odd problem. Browsing to the main page of the site generates this error:

Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 17039360) (tried to allocate 30720 bytes) in /home/<user>/public_html/wp-includes/default-widgets.php on line 797

Normally I’d expect this issue to be caused by a memory_limit restriction in either the php.ini file on the server, or a memory limit directive in wp-config.php. However I’ve changed the limit in both to 64MB (and restarted Apache and checked that this is the applied setting with a phpinfo script) and this error has persisted.

What is strange is that it’s choking at around 16MB of memory – it should have another 48MB to play with! The Apache error logs aren’t too helpful and I’m not that familiar with WordPress so I don’t know if this is a known issue. Searching for other topics on this issue has just got me a load of articles on how to update the memory_limit directive, which hasn’t helped.

I’d appreciate any help that you WordPress gurus can offer with this. Cheers!