One "...bytes exhausted.." solution

[Guest]

We were copying one store to another and got the dreaded "Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted at (null):0 (tried to allocate 35 bytes) in..." error message.

 

After beating our heads against the wall for a couple of days on this we discovered that our "categories" table was allowing a category_id of "0". I'm not sure if all installs of oscommerce don't want this or if it's just ours.

 

I suspect the error is involved with having a category ID of 0 with a parent of 0 and causing a loop or hitting some other "0" id error checking.

 

Here's an explanation and our solution. Assume new store's tables are prefixed with "z_":

 

We created our tables using statements like the following:

"create z_categories select * from categories;"

 

There was no problem until we tried to add a category. The new category inserted with the "0" record Id causing the error. Clearing the table got rid of the error until we tried to add a new category. (note we also cleared the description table and other tables like products etc).

 

Fix:

 

Creating the table from scratch using:

 

CREATE TABLE z_categories (

categories_id int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,

categories_image varchar(64) default NULL,

parent_id int(11) NOT NULL default '0',

sort_order int(3) default NULL,

date_added datetime default NULL,

last_modified datetime default NULL,

categories_root int(11) NOT NULL default '0',

PRIMARY KEY (categories_id),

KEY idx_categories_parent_id (parent_id)

) TYPE=MyISAM;

 

Then doing an insert with the select to retrieve the other categories from the old store solved the problem. I think this is only a problem with "categories".

 

FYI, I've seen suggstions of "ALTER TABLE `z_categories` AUTO_INCREMENT = 1;" but that just sets the incrementing value and not the start value. There may be a "start value" command that would have also solved our problem.

 

Anyway, I hope this helps someone down the road from making head shaped dents in their walls.

 

--q