App frequently returns 500 error - PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (cloudron)

[SansGuidon]

Hi,

I'm using Shaarli 0.14.0 in a Cloudron (Docker-based web apps manager) setup and I frequently face errors for the past months and it seems to not improve with the growth of the Shaarli Database.
My Shaarli DB is not extremely big (around 9K links)

I did investigate a bit and tuned the app resources with more memory via Cloudron and via the Shaarli dedicated php.ini, yet I see no improvement.

php.ini

max_execution_time = 300
memory_limit = 512M
post_max_size = 64M

I started to observe that months ago with web crawlers increasing the traffic on my Shaarli instance, so I had to perform IP-blocking. But now even when I use Shaarli, like loading the home page or some search permalinks, I almost get a 500 every 1 out of 10 requests, sometimes more frequently.

Everytime this 500 occurs, this is logged:

Mar 04 13:46:20 [Tue Mar 04 12:46:20.147669 2025] [php:error] [pid 103] [client 172.18.0.1:46866] PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 9235624 bytes) in /app/code/application/bookmark/BookmarkIO.php on line 93

In the last 20 minutes, this fatal error occured 20+ times.

Any idea how I could troubleshoot/mitigate this? I suspect that reading the shaarli data is a sensitive I/O operation which is the only thing I observe through the resources utilization graph -> the memory utilization is stable

however the disk utilization is high and correlated with Shaarli usage/Shaarli reading the DB.

Help / ideas are welcome 🙏🏻

PS: I observe that the init.php file of Shaarli fixes the max memory to 128M.
https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli/blob/master/init.php#L18

[SansGuidon]

I'm currently investigating if the php.ini set for this app in Cloudron are correct because despite increasing above 128M, the error is that we exhaust 128M so I'll come back to investigate how CLoudron packages the app (https://git.cloudron.io/packages/shaarli-app/-/blob/master/Dockerfile?ref_type=heads) and if I can't solve it, then I'll open an issue on Cloudron forum. It seems the memory limit is set at 128M by default in the Cloudron package, and despite I'm trying to override this setting, something is wrong.

Anyway I wonder this issue is Cloudron specific not Shaarli specific, even if I find the I/O utilization too high.

PS : I observe that the init.php file of Shaarli fixes the max memory to 128M. Could that be the root cause? How to override this at deployment time? https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli/blob/master/init.php#L18

[SansGuidon]

I've increased the max memory for the Shaarli app on Cloudron and the memory in php.ini but that was not enough. Even forcing memory limit by prepending some php script from php.ini in order to override ini_set did some trick but the error still occured.
I'm currently trying with a more recent version of PHP version through the image provided by Cloudron (https://git.cloudron.io/packages/shaarli-app/-/commit/d4bf54ac8990861e575d34ce2f217e4922afd63a) and it seems to bring more stability.
Hopefully this remains valid for a longer period, I've yet to keep this on my radar for the next few hours.
Follow up : https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/13382/app-crashing-frequently-throws-500-error-php-fatal-error-allowed-memory-size-of-134217728-bytes-exhausted/2

[nodiscc]

@SansGuidon if I understand correctly changing the PHP memory_limit did not have any effect on the shaarli app provided by Cloudron. Correct?

If that's the case, I'd rather close this issue and let you debug with cloudron maintainers... that would 100% be a third-party packaging bug.

Was the problem fixed eventually?

[SansGuidon]

Hi @nodiscc Thanks for the feedback
what I noticed is that whatever I put as memory limit in php.ini, the init.php of shaarli (so nothing to do with Cloudron) does not care about it. is that correct?

how Cloudron mitigated my issue is they updated the PHP version in their base image for shaarli and this improved the stability. I'm not sure to fully understand their explanation and how that fixes anything, but so here is the link to the exact forum post where they announced how they would help me: https://forum.cloudron.io/post/102636 and the git change : https://git.cloudron.io/packages/shaarli-app/-/commit/d4bf54ac8990861e575d34ce2f217e4922afd63a

So something about PHO 8.3 and the apache2 version.

One angle is: shaarli runs with a memory limit at container level. apache spins out processes and each of this has a php limit. It is possible that if apache spins say 5 processes, then 5*128MB > container limit . So, can you try adjusting the app memory limit to say 800MB and checking if that helps ? If that's the case, we can also adjust the package to use a better default memory limit.

If that rings a bell to someone, please enlighten me

Note that it's not the first time I noticed issues with Shaarli packaged by Cloudron but that was for another issue (https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/13233/shaarli-app-crashing-constantly-due-to-indexing-bots-yandex-co).

Anyway feel free to close the issue here, as it's anyway at least solved in Cloudron.

[dsalo]

Related in any way to #2032?

[nodiscc]

@SansGuidon the message you are getting PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted is definitely the application exhausting the 128MB of memory allocated to its PHP processes in php.ini.

You must increase this value at some point if the datastore gets large enough. For reference I have 8682 shaares and had to increase it to 256M at some point or it would crash regularly.

It is hardcoded there in their configuration. You can try to edit /etc/php/8.3/apache2/php.ini and restart apache2 but I don't know how/if this is supposed to work on Cloudron. Your best bet is to ask on their forum how to permanently increase this value.