At some point, anyone building a theme, plugin, or even just working with WordPress has seen the Fatal Error: Memory Exhausted message. It typically reads something like this:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size is 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocated 29596635 bytes) in …/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 885.
Yes, your message may be a little different, but the point is the same: You see a fatal error, it has something to do with the amount of memory allowed, how much was attempted to be allocated, and what file threw the error.
In my opinion, one of the big problems with errors like this is that it’s far too easy to Google for a quick solution to fix the problem rather than truly understand the problem.
Sure, I understand we’ve got stuff to do and work to get done, but understanding what the problem may be is important to helping us become better developers, and, who knows, we may uncover a bug in a piece of open source software.
In this case, it’s not the latter, but here’s a good way to go about understanding the above error.
