Searching Error - Allowed memory size of 25165824 bytes exhausted

[Zachery]

by default guests i believe are restricted by the same limits as members.

[MGSteve]

Thats why most admins unless they have some very very fast system limit searching. As by default i think its every 30 seconds, IIRC the search system was improved in 3.0.3 and I do belive it is somthing we are working on in the future.

But there is a point when you really do need to up your memory limit.

How are the searches limited then? I don't really want to do members only searching as that's pointless, one of the real benefits comes from guest being able to search the forums for solutions to problems or information.

I recall there's supposed to be a limit to the number of searches you can do per minute - somthing like that. I have a theory how this could be exploited, I'll try it on my site and if it does pose a DOS problem, I'll email support directly.

[Zachery]

Thats why most admins unless they have some very very fast system limit searching. As by default i think its every 30 seconds, IIRC the search system was improved in 3.0.3 and I do belive it is somthing we are working on in the future.

But there is a point when you really do need to up your memory limit.

[MGSteve]

Besides which, it could quite easily be the basis of a DOS attack on any VB forum out there, all someone needs to do is guess a common word in your forums, find out what combination causes the error and then submit multiple searches every second... bring any server down to its knees very quickly.

[MGSteve]

I'm currently running 4.3.3 and still getting the same out of memory errors.

What other options are there to get around this problem?

Personally I find it incredible that Jelsoft find it acceptible for an instance of VB to use 16 or 32mb and simply say 'increase your php memory limits'.

Fine if you're on a quiet site, if you run a busy site and potientally could have 10/20 people searching at the same time - it would quite easy cripple the server in minutes.

Perhaps instead of going for the easy option of telling us to increase memory limits, you could rewrite the search engine to be a damn sight more efficient?

[daFish]

What about PHP 4.2.3?
Are there such bugs that cause memory leaks too?

-Fish

[Steve Machol]

Zach is right. There are LOTS of problems with PHP 4.2.2 that affect vB.

[Zachery]

Honestly, its in your best intrests to upgrade php if its possible.

There are tons and tons of bugs assoiated with vBulletin and php 4.2.2

[Vigile]

This only happens during searches though... ?

[Zachery]

I think some of the php 4.2.2 serries bugs was memory leaks

[Vigile]

Is this really going to fix anything related to my problem or are you just throwing that out there?

[Zachery]

Your php is terribly out of date, php 4.2.2 is very very buggy, you should try upgrading to 4.3.6.

[Vigile]

yep, done.

[Zachery]

Can you enable public phpinfo in the AdminCP for a few?

[Vigile]

Max search results is set to 250