Title: Too much data?
Last modified: August 19, 2016

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# Too much data?

 *  Resolved [ndp](https://wordpress.org/support/users/ndp/)
 * (@ndp)
 * [16 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/too-much-data/)
 * To put this one very briefly;
 * I was asked to have a page on my site that generates a list of all the items 
   submitted by users.
 * I do a database query, and I render the results into a styled table.
 * This is accomplished with some php code embedded in the page using the ExecPHP
   plugin.
 * This worked fine for datasets up to about 100 items/rows.
 * But after about 110 or so, the code began to just hang. The page would render,
   but the contents of the eval() would return nothing, so I’d have a blank page.
 * By shortening the contents of the Description string from a limit of 1000 characters
   to 250, I was able to get it to work again, but further testing revealed that
   when I add enough items, this code is going to die again.
 * It is as if ExecPHP is going to allow me to add so many characters to a page,
   and if I exceed that limit, it decides to give up.
 * My query returns all the data fine, and the data in the variables is fine. The
   problem happens when I try to echo or print the formatted contents to the screen.
 * By putting this code in a template file, outside of the page contents, I was 
   able to circumvent this limitation (I think) – but then the wp-postratings info
   isn’t available from that context, so I get the tag markup and post-id instead.
 * This site relies heavily on such “list-views” so I guess I’m fortunate that we
   didn’t end up scaling to a whole lot of feedback. But it would be nice if I could
   find out the cause of this seemingly weird limitation. 1000 characters times 
   100 items = 100,000, that’s not a lot. I can write posts with ten times that 
   amount of data that publish just fine.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

 *  [Nile Flores](https://wordpress.org/support/users/blondishnet/)
 * (@blondishnet)
 * [16 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/too-much-data/#post-1260866)
 * is there a site to look at.
 * php memory in WordPress is usually set to 32MB. It could be, BUT usually you 
   would get some type of error about it saying memory exceeded.
 *  [Mark / t31os](https://wordpress.org/support/users/t31os_/)
 * (@t31os_)
 * [16 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/too-much-data/#post-1260893)
 * Be better to see the code you’re using, can’t think why you’d want to eval the
   code…
 * Thought about paging the results?, so you can grab a set amount per page, limiting
   how intensive the query will be..
 * Again, i’d like to see the code you use for the query.. 🙂 please..
 *  Thread Starter [ndp](https://wordpress.org/support/users/ndp/)
 * (@ndp)
 * [16 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/too-much-data/#post-1261019)
 * Sorry I forgot to include the link to the public-facing site – this is the page
   which I believe will have a problem at a certain point:
    [https://edtechfuture.org/?page_id=9787](https://edtechfuture.org/?page_id=9787)
 * Here’s a version of the same page, where I have raised the limit on the number
   of characters displayed in the “Brief Description” field. (All I’m doing here,
   is changing substr($post_excerpt, 0, 250) to substr($post_excerpt, 0, 500)). 
   This version crashes.
    [https://edtechfuture.org/?page_id=9971](https://edtechfuture.org/?page_id=9971)
 * Whether I hit this limit seems to depend on two factors:
    The number of items(
   rows) displayed, and the amount of data per row. Right now, since I only have
   a few rows, I am limiting the amount of data per row by abridging the description.
 * To simplify this, I wrote some test code that can reproduce the error:
 *     ```
       <div id="reslist">
       <table id="reslist" cellspacing="0" border="0" width="100%" summary="A table to see what Exec PHP's apparent rendering limit is">
       <tr>
       <th scope="col" abbr="Column 1">Column 1</th>
       <th scope="col" abbr="Column 2">Column 2</th>
       <th scope="col" abbr="Column 3">Column 3</th>
       <th scope="col" abbr="Column 4">Column 4</th>
       </tr>
   
       <?php
       for ( $i = 0; $i < 100 ; $i++) {
       		$x = "abcdefghij";
       		$y = $x;
       		for( $j = 0 ; $j < 10 ; $j++ ) {
       			$y .= $y . " " ;
       		}
   
       		?>
       		<tr>
       			<td><?php print($x); ?></td>
       			<td><?php print($x); ?></td>
       			<td><?php print($y); ?></td>
       			<td><?php print($x); ?></td>
       		</tr>
   
       <?php } ?>
       <tr><td><?php print($i); ?> items submitted.</td>
       </tr></table>
       </div>
       ```
   
 * So when my $i loop is set to a max of 987 (much higher than I thought), and $
   j to 10, I can reproduce the crash – so this problem has absolutely nothing at
   all to do with the sql query.
 * (and I could simply omit the third-column print statement and go to 10,000 rows,
   and it would chug along just fine; it’s not allocation of memory for this data,
   it’s the amount that is getting rendered).
 * When I set $i’s limit to 100, $j craps out at about 13 (because the size of that
   $y field increments geometrically).
 * So here’s the kicker. If I render something up near the limit – view source, 
   copy the html, then paste that into the editor of a new page, I have just static
   html in this page now, no php – then I do an Update Page, and when the screen
   refreshes, that window is blank. WordPress no-likey. I’m trying to identify where,
   exactly that limit is.
 * My wp-config.php has the memory set to 96MB. Changing this to 128 or 256 did 
   not appear to make any difference.
 *  Thread Starter [ndp](https://wordpress.org/support/users/ndp/)
 * (@ndp)
 * [16 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/too-much-data/#post-1261023)
 * I think I might be hitting this:
    [http://wordpress.org/support/topic/256910?replies=28](http://wordpress.org/support/topic/256910?replies=28)
 * Probably why my test program displays so much more data, and why I can get away
   with more if I run my code straight in a template: the shortcodes make this problem
   worse somehow.
 *  Thread Starter [ndp](https://wordpress.org/support/users/ndp/)
 * (@ndp)
 * [16 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/too-much-data/#post-1261026)
 * Yep. That was it.
 *  1. Open PHP.INI in a text editor of your choice (normally you can find php.ini
   in your php install dir)
    2. Change the recursion limit to 200x normal, that 
   is, set: pcre.recursion_limit=20000000 3. Change the backtrack limit to 100x 
   normal, that is, set: pcre.backtrack_limit=10000000 4. Stop and start the Apache(
   or IIS) service
 * Lucky me – I have access to my php.ini!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

The topic ‘Too much data?’ is closed to new replies.

 * In: [Fixing WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/how-to-and-troubleshooting/)
 * 5 replies
 * 3 participants
 * Last reply from: [ndp](https://wordpress.org/support/users/ndp/)
 * Last activity: [16 years, 6 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/too-much-data/#post-1261026)
 * Status: resolved

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