The indieweb.org wiki has a page about Wordpress with a Criticism section.
One of those "issues" listed is Fatal Error memory exhausted, which reads so:
WordPress seems to run out of memory on servers sometimes, and give a message like:
e.g. on http://yottabytes.info/?p=10497 (on 2014-06-08 15:28 EDT):
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 41943040 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 32 bytes) in /home/johnkrol/public_html/wp-includes/post.php on line 1961
I removed that section because it's nonsense to list a server configuration issue as Criticism.
Yesterday Tantek reverted it because:
worth keeping actual error seen in the wild as a known issue until evidence presented that it's been fixed in an update, actual fail 32 bytes
This forces me to issue a personal statement:
Dear Tantek, please try toacceptexplore the idea that others know a thing or two that you don't.
Error explanation
What does this error actually mean?
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 41943040 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 32 bytes) in /path/to/file.php on line 1961
PHP allows you to hard-limit the RAM that PHP applications are allowed to use. The setting is called memory_limit, and it is configured in your web server's php.ini file.
When the code that is run by PHP needs to allocate memory - for example when a new variable is initialized - then PHP checks how much memory that variable needs, and if the currently used memory plus the new variable is with the configured memory_limit.
If the new memory allocation would exceed that limit, PHP simply adheres to its configuration and says "Sorry, I can't do that" but in other words:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of XXX bytes exhausted
The limit that Tantek saw was 41943040, which is - when divided by 1024 twice - exactly 40 MiB. Thus we can assume that johnkrol's server had the following php.ini setting:
memory_limit = 40M
The fact that this error was raised when WordPress tried to initialize a variable of 32 bytes is irrelevant here.