Put simply, the ‘bigger’ your website then the more php memory it needs to successfully run. Every WP theme option and every extra plugin ups the requirements. And you have run out! Or at least you are running out during some memory intensive operations.

As the years have gone by the core WordPress requirements have gone up and up and both BuddyPress and Simple:Press a both largish before we take into consideration any other plugins you may have.

Normally I would point you to our FAQ on the subject (https://simple-press.com/documentation/codex/faq/troubleshooting/i-have-a-fatal-error-that-says-i-have-run-out-of-memory/) and it would still be worth giving that quick solution a try. But you are clearly already consuming 256MB so you will need to adjust the value higher than that.

It is also always a good time to just check that you are not loading anything you do not need or no longer want. Any WP plugins that you may have tried out once but not deactivated etc., all add to the dstarin of your php memory needs. Of you can lighten that load it is always worth it whether you are close to the edge or not.

In the end you may need to ask your host for a lift. In my own experience they are usually not hostile to such requests.

Thanks for the quick reply.

I have been in contact with my host. They say there are no problems on their end regarding my site.

I have also tried increasing the WP_MEMORY_LIMIT to 512M, to no avail. Increasing it to 1024M did not work either.

At this point everything I’m reading says I should start looking at my .htaccess file. Is this the right way to go?

I am not that knowledgeable on htaccess I am afraid. Mr Papa knows more but he will be sleeping now!

If you are getting an our of memory error with 512MB set then I would suspect that your host is not allowing that sort of dynamic increase suggesting as we said, that you may need to ask them for an actual increase.

Ok, I also edited the default-constants page (located in wp-includes. I no longer get the error, but my site is taking a ridiculously long time to load if it even loads at all. 

At this point I’d just like to disable the new SP plugins I bought so my forum is as least operational. Is there a way to do this from my hosting admin panel? I’m grasping for any kind of solution that will get my site back online and I’ll tinker more offline.

Well, for the time being I have renamed the SP plugin so it deactivated itself. As soon as I restore the original name I get the same memory problems and my site is constantly trying to load.

I will look at ways I can reduce memory usage, but I think that there’s a bigger underlying issue. My SP forum is offline for now, unfortunately, but at least the rest of the site is operational now. Hopefully we can resolve this soon.

Sorry – I was just about to come back and say that this doesn’t sound like a normal memory issue.

So – it is the BuddyPress Integration plugin you are having the issue with. Is that right? Are all other non-SP components up to date? WordPress itself and the main BuddyPress plugin? I know there was an issue at some stage quite a while back with a BP setting bit as far as I was aware this had all been resolved. I will see if I can find the thread…

All plugins and themes are up to date. I am also using the latest version of WordPress.

I believe the problem is with the BuddyPress addition, but I can’t really isolate it to be certain (at least I don’t know how to). I have not had any fatal errors regarding memory in a long time, and it happened pretty much instantly after I used the SP auto-installer for the BuddyPress addition.

Found it… there was an issue over a year ago that would cause a memory error when the notifications module of buddypress was disabled. This was, of course, fixed.

On that particular occasion, @mr-papa – who works our BP plugin, suggested that the user…

uninstall our buddypress plugin…  deactivate the wp buddypress plugin… activate our buddypress plugin.. then activate the wp buddypress plugin… 

And the user came back and said that this resolved it. Trouble is, I have no idea why he made that suggestion! Might be worth a quick try…

Is there a way to uninstall the SP BuddyPress plugin without the SP plugin being activated? As soon as I activate the SP plugin, my site bogs right down and I can’t do a thing.

I am getting confused here. You said earlier the problem was with the BuddyPress integration plugin. So are you now saying that the problem is with the main SP core plugin? Perhaps you could provide a little more detailed explanation from the beginning…

But if you ever need to deactivate a WordPress plugin and can not get to the WP plugins admin page then all you need to do is physically remove it from the WP plugins folder.

Ok perhaps I skipped some steps so I’ll start at the top.

I have been using Simple Press for about a month without any extra plugins. I have about 2,000 posts in the last month so everything seemed to be working fine up until today. Today, I purchased the Gold Membership and downloaded 3 Simple Press plugins to my computer. I began uploading them one by one using the Simple Press uploader in the WordPress admin panel. The first two plugins uploaded successfully and I activated them successfully. The third plugin (the BuddyPress Integration from Group 2) was uploaded to my site, and within seconds I received a fatal error for memory. I am not 100% sure, but I don’t think I was even able to activate the BuddyPress Integration plugin. I think I got the error upon uploading it to my site.

That’s where I stand right now. Simple Press is currently deactivated on my site. If I try to activate it, my site slows down so that I cannot do anything at all.

You mentioned deactivating the BuddyPress Integration, but I cannot even get to the screen where I have the option to deactivate it, because as soon as I activate Simple Press I cannot do anything on my site. So, I’m not too sure where to go from here. But I need to hit the sack for a few hours. When I have some time in the morning I will check back and try to troubleshoot this thing some more.

Thanks for all your help so far. I really appreciate it.

Using an ftp client – or your hosting panel file manager – just go to the forum plugins folder – by default /wp-content/sp-resources/forum-plugins/ and remove the BuddyPress SP plugin.

Of course there is always the chance that a file became corrupted during the download from our site or during the upload to yours. It is rare but it can happen. Might be worth scrapping it and downloading again.

Thanks Swordfish! I didn’t know where the SP plugins were stored. I have successfully removed it and the forum is in working order again.

Additionally, I tried to re-download the BuddyPress plugin and upon uploading it to the site I get the same error. I doubt there was downloading/uploading corruption twice in a row so there must be somethingelse going on. For now, I will just keep the BuddyPress plugin off of my site so my forum doesn’t go offline again.

Thanks again for the help and advice! Hopefully we can also figure out this BP issue but at least everything still works on my site in the meantime.

only one other user with issue like this – the one Andy referred too… and him doing a different enabling order made it work…  no clue why, but has been isolated incident…  and our budyppress plugin is a popular one..  did you try the other sequence?