PHP Memory limit on a post with a lot of footnotes
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I’m getting the WordPress “white screen of death” on a particularly long post with a lot of footnotes. I know that the footnotes plugin is the culprit since I test ran the post with all of the bracketed footnote tags removed, and it displayed fine. In another test post I edited the post to remove some content and it displays fine until I hit around 285 footnotes.
I’d like to know two things: one practical and the other theoretical.
First the practical: what can I do to get my post to display with all my 318 footnotes? (The total word count for the post with the footnotes is 25,290.)
Second, the theoretical: what is the maximum number of footnotes (or size of all footnotes) that wordpress can display under default PHP server limits? (I’ve defined my WP_MEMORY_LIMIT in my wp_config.php file as 128M.)
I’m sharing the raw text of my too-many-footnotes post at my dropbox here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/h90sz2ruzqrb1fw/too_many_footnotes-post.txt?dl=1
(If you’re able to troubleshoot, note that in the text linked above I use [foot][/foot] to define footnotes using the footnotes plugin.)
I run some other plugins on my site which add code to pages but haven’t seen this problem crop up for a while. It’s only ever been a problem for long posts on my site.
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Some more frustration, alas.
I increased the PHP memory limit via our cPanel, and our WP_MEMORY_LIMIT via wp_config.php (both to 512M). I also increased the PHP post_max_size to 64M for good measure. I cleared the site cache.
Our WordPress is the latest v.5.8.1. Our PHP is v7.3.32; we see site breakage when we update to 7.4.25. After I tried updating the PHP version to 7.4.25, I broke the site and then downgraded back to 7.3.32. (Footnotes plugin is v. 2.7.3)
Success with 286 footnotes: https://opensiddur.org/?p=40219
Failure with 318 footnotes: https://opensiddur.org/?p=40217
At first I thought I had a breakthrough, but on review I see that I was only succeeding with the version of the post where I removed all the bracketed footnotes plugin tags.
Thank you @spiralofhope2 for running a test.
@spaceling, @spiralofhope2’s success hints that it might be an issue with the PHP version, or with the Footnotes version. If PHP 7.4.25 does not work for your website, perhaps its theme is using deprecated language features, among those listed in https://www.php.net/manual/en/migration74.deprecated.php. Although I advocate following WordPress in being PHP 5.6 compatible, I’d recommend staying safe by upgrading to PHP 8.0 if possible.
Of course deleting notes is unacceptable, the software must handle the content full-length.
Thanks for the update. Using Health Check & Troubleshooting https://wordpress.org/plugins/health-check/ would allow to keep them all running while checking how it works out when turned off.
Conversely I’m going to install the two mentioned plugins.
Update: None of the cited plugins appear as the culprits.
All 307 notes still displaying, also after activating virtually all optimization options, minifying, clearing site cache after updates, no problem spotted so far.The origin may perhaps be a conflict with another plugin.
Thank you– I found the culprit: External Links, a plugin which I see hasn’t been updated in five years but is still in use by 20,000 (!) sites.
I have no idea why this plugin would conflict with Footnotes in just this circumstance, but thank you, @pewgeuges, for your help and encouragement in troubleshooting this issue.
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