Question

PHP App Platform "Assuming 512MB of RAM" not scaling

Anybody know how to increase the amount of RAM PHP can use on the App Platform?

I’ve read this discussion post but the recommendation to add “php_memory_limit” to the .user.ini doesn’t work. Assuming they meant memory_limt, that only changes how much each worker can consume, not the total allocation.

For example, in our .user.ini file we specify the following:

memory_limit = 32M

Our deployment logs show the following:

Assuming 512MB of RAM
PHP memory_limit is 32M Bytes
Starting php-fpm with 16 workers...

This would make sense if we only had 512MB of ram but we’re on the professional-xs which is 1GB of RAM and a 1 shared CPU. It’s only utilizing half of our total RAM. In addition to that, increasing the memory_limit decreases the total workers created. The formula DOAP uses to calculate workers is: 512MB / memory_limit or 128M if not specified in the .user.ini file.

How do we increase the total RAM PHP can use?

What confuses us more is, if we deploy the same repository as the professional-xl which comes with 16GB of RAM and 4 Dedicated CPUs, it STILL only uses 512MB of RAM. What’s the point of vertical scaling if it doesn’t increase the RAM allocation towards PHP? You could be paying $12 a month or $300 a month and the performance for PHP would be the SAME!

We’ve also tried adjusting the WEB_CONCURRENCY variable but that has no effect on increasing the 512MB limit.

What are we missing?


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Shivani Kumar
DigitalOcean Employee
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January 19, 2023

Hello @zacharymalter,

I’m happy to share that we have fixed this issue and PHP apps now scale correctly per the selected instance sizes.

Please be sure to remove any custom .user.ini or WEB_CONCURRENCY configs that were suggested before as a workaround.

Happy coding!

alexdo
Site Moderator
Site Moderator badge
November 20, 2022

Hello there,

I’ll post an answer from Steve from our community:

You can add a .user.ini file to your codebase with something like memory_limit=512M in it to set an explicit memory limit. Alternatively you could update your run command to be prefixed with an equivalent echo 'memory_limit=512M' > .user.ini && . Unfortunately, setting the COMPOSER_MEMORY_LIMIT environment variable isn’t currently working as you’d expect in the PHP buildpack.

You can check this question where this was originally posted:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/php-memory-limit-digitalocean-apps

Regards

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