Unable to update plugins after upgrade to 4.2

I have the same problem, with CentOS 6.6 and php 5.3.3.
But there is an error in error logs saying
“PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 1073741824 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 523800 bytes) in /data/www/mysite.com/wp-admin/includes/file.php on line 159, referer: http://www.mysite.com/wp-admin/update.php?action=update-selected&plugins=redirection%2Fredirection.php%2Cwordpress-seo%2Fwp-seo.php&_wpnonce=06cc2873d8”

Tried increasing php memory to 1GB, even after that this error is shown and plugins are not updating.
I could update the plugins before updating to wordpress4.2

So I have this same issue with one particular host.
I have updated this morning more than 10 wp sites, all with multiple different plugins. All updated fine after the 4.2 wordpress update.

This one particular host, turns out they are also running on CentOS.
So far that is the only common thing that seems to have an issue with updating plugins after 4.2

Confirmed Pyromania666!

It also works in the case of a theme update, where I had to deactivate first and then update the theme to get it to update.

I encountered the same situation on several websites. I’ve narrowed the issue in my case down to wordpress installations which are hosted on sub-domains instead of the main domain (or actually, in addition to the main domain). Any website which was not hosted on a sub-domain updated itself fine on the same exact server. In case of the sub-domains this was not a multi-site install.

jaykrik, that is also the error message I was getting, and my memory allowance is clearly over the amount the error says I need.

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 523800 bytes) in /wp-admin/includes/file.php on line 159

Thank you so much Pyromania and Perdrix.
I encountered the plugin-updating-problem this morning, but not on all sites. The sub-domain sites were the problem.
Tried your solution and worked like a charm.

So it is going to be a good weekend after all 😉

The problem is caused by the wp_tempnam() function in wp-admin/file.php

It recurses on itself and therefore php will run out of memory. This seems to be called when “enabling maintenance mode” so by deactivating the plugin first, presumably this will avoid maintenance mode.

Unfortunately it seems like a WordPress update itself requires maintenance mode, so this could get interesting when an update is released to fix the problem!

recursive call can be seen below ‘if the folder is falsey…’ – “return wp_tempnam(“…..

function wp_tempnam( $filename = '', $dir = '' ) {
        if ( empty( $dir ) ) {
                $dir = get_temp_dir();
        }

        if ( empty( $filename ) || '.' == $filename ) {
                $filename = time();
        }

        // Use the basename of the given file without the extension as the name for the temporary directory
        $temp_filename = basename( $filename );
        $temp_filename = preg_replace( '|\.[^.]*$|', '', $temp_filename );

        // If the folder is falsey, use it's parent directory name instead
        if ( ! $temp_filename ) {
                return wp_tempnam( dirname( $filename ), $dir );
        }

        $temp_filename .= '.tmp';
        $temp_filename = $dir . wp_unique_filename( $dir, $temp_filename );
        touch( $temp_filename );

        return $temp_filename;
}

Keith

Thank you Keith @cloudware, that was exactly the issue, on “some” of my sites.

To be able to update the plugins and themes before the release of 4.2.1 with the fix, I temporarily copied the function wp_tempnam from the same file from WP 4.1.1 and it worked.

Thx again! also for reporting it.

62 sites affected, will not do it manually, hope a fix is coming soon…