Can you please provide the actual PHP error message here? With that, we can probably solve this problem, but without it, there’s nothing we can do.
You can find the error message in the server PHP error log. Your hosting provider can help you find out where that is if you don’t know.
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I’ve just checked the log file and there is nothing referring to Relevanssi. There are references to another plugin so I’ve now disabled that one and re-enabled Relevanssi and the site is still working. Confusing though as to why disabling Relevanssi brought my site back online in the first place (which was why I assumed Relevanssi must have been causing the issue).
Actually it looks like the lines that caused the error don’t refer to a specific plugin at all:
[19-Aug-2026 06:01:40 UTC] PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2097160 bytes) in /home/ethicalrev/public_html/wp-includes/class-wpdb.php on line 3118
But it was disabling Relevanssi that brought it back online.
Ah, I see. You’re out of memory. That’s a bit tricky one, as it doesn’t really tell where the actual problem is. Relevanssi in itself shouldn’t be a memory hog, but running searches can require some amount, especially if the search is not well configured and the site is big. However, when not doing a search, Relevanssi uses hardly any memory – on my test site, the front page is 10.1 megabytes, Relevanssi or not.
If you have some kind of programming error where Relevanssi is running searches on every page load, that would explain it, but that’s hard to come by on accident. Do you have any custom PHP code related to searching or Relevanssi?
I don’t think so. And I agree with you in that I don’t think Relevanssi is taking much memory up. I wonder if a Relevanssi search just happened to be the straw that broke the camel’s back on this occasion. There is another plugin (now diasabled and reported to author who is going to issue a fix) that appears to have built up the excess memory usage. I wonder if it was going through that process and about to reach the memory limit anyway when a search just happened to tip it over the edge. Thank you for such swift response anyway.
