PHP Composer update “cannot allocate memory” error (using Laravel 4)

Question

I just can\'t solve this one.

I\'m on Linode 1G RAM basic plan. Trying to install a package via Composer and it\'s not letting me. My memory limit is set to \"-1\" o

Answer 1

This seems to be a recurring issue with 1GB and smaller server instances. Apart from trying to shutdown processes and tweak swap settings, you could install on a local machine and upload.

Answer 2

In my case I tried everything that was listed above. I was using Laravel and Vagrant with 4GB of memory and a swap, with memory limit set to -1. I deleted the vendor/ and tried other PHP-versions. Finally, I managed it to work by running

vagrant halt
vagrant up

And then composer install worked again as usual.

Answer 3

As composer troubleshooting guide here This could be happening because the VPS runs out of memory and has no Swap space enabled.

free -m

To enable the swap you can use for example:

sudo /bin/dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swap.1 bs=1M count=1024
sudo /sbin/mkswap /var/swap.1
sudo /sbin/swapon /var/swap.1

Or if above not worked then you can try create a swap file

sudo fallocate -l 2G /swapfile
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile

Answer 4

Sometimes by self-updating composer it solves the problem

php composer.phar self-update

Cheers

Answer 5

Try that:

/bin/dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swap.1 bs=1M count=1024

/sbin/mkswap /var/swap.1

/sbin/swapon /var/swap.1

Answer 6

I use it for 500MB RAM and it works for me.

php -d memory_limit=-1 /usr/local/bin/composer install