Memory limit

[RSully]

Recently I've been consistently hitting composer's 512M limit, so I've created a wrapper composer-infmem that I can use instead.

For slightly bigger projects is it common to consistently hit the limit (on updates/requires)? Is it time to consider lifting the limit from 512M?

(Also worth tagging homebrew/homebrew-php#1210)

[vierbergenlars]

Composer does not have a 512M memory limit.
If memory_limit in php.ini is smaller than 512M, composer tries to set it to 512M to avoid hitting a PHP memory limit that is too low.
You can always tweak the memory_limit configuration option in php.ini to set a higher limit. Composer will not lower the limit.

[RSully]

Sorry for wording it that way, I understand it isn't a "limit", as it only sets it to that value if the limit is already below than that.

Coming from a clean OSX install (brew install php55 composer) the result is that by default the upper limit is being enforced by composer's 512M increase since the default PHP memory limit is much lower. It doesn't make sense to me for users to increase the entire system's memory just for composer.

[vierbergenlars]

Ok, so running composer on your project uses more than 512MB of memory.
Do you happen to have a very large dependency graph? (maybe copy your composer.json so I can try to repro?)
You can check memory usage by using the --profile flag.

[RSully]

{
    "require": {
        "laravel/framework": "4.2.*",
        "internal/administrator": "*@dev",
        "rhumsaa/uuid": "~2.7"
    },
    "require-dev": {
        "barryvdh/laravel-ide-helper": "1.*",
        "way/generators": "2.*",
        "fzaninotto/faker": "~1.4"
    }
}

internal/administrator is one of our own repositories (defined in repositories as vcs) and its requirements are:

{
    "require": {
        "barryvdh/laravel-ide-helper": "1.*",
        "imagine/imagine": "~0.5.0",
        "anahkiasen/html-object": "~1.4",
        "anahkiasen/underscore-php": "~1.2"
    }
}

---

The memory limit is hit with the following error:

PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 536870912 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 32 bytes) in phar:///usr/local/Cellar/composer/1.0.0-alpha8/libexec/composer.phar/src/Composer/DependencyResolver/Rule.php on line 62

[RSully]

With --profile on my infmem wrapper:

composer-infmem update --profile
[6.8MB/0.06s] Loading composer repositories with package information
[7.5MB/0.55s] Reading compos
[28.2MB/1.80s] Updating dependencies (including require-dev)
[608.3MB/163.65s] Nothing to install or update
[166.9MB/171.00s] Generating autoload files
Generating optimized class loader
Memory usage: 166.93MB (peak: 608.57MB), time: 173.4s

[vierbergenlars]

Running on my system gives a peak usage of 106MB with the latest version 1e27ff5
Unless your internal repository contains a HUGE amount of branches or tags, I can't immediately see where the trouble comes from.

Possibly the same bug as #2959

[RSully]

That particular repository is only a master branch without any tags/releases. Perhaps that has something to do with it?

[vierbergenlars]

IIRC, composer only scans the latest commit on every branch & tag, so that should not be a problem. I have already used VCS repositories with only a master branch without any trouble.

[rk3rn3r]

to make sure to not hit the php memory limit, set another one with "php -d" and to make sure to get no timeouts you can also add: "COMPOSER_PROCESS_TIMEOUT=60000", sometimes I needed it in case of timeouts

example:

COMPOSER_PROCESS_TIMEOUT=60000 php -d memory_limit=2048M /path/to/composer/composer.phar install

[Seldaek]

limit is now 1GB and we have improved on memory usage quite a bit so closing