Hello everyone!
For all of you that have noticed, there’s a new (and important) update available for WordPress. Version 2.9 features can be found here. I write this post for people who have had troubles upgrading their WordPress in the past or recently using the automatic service provided. A typical problem with automatic upgrades looks something like…
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 34554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2355240 bytes) in directory_path/public_html/wp-includes/http.php on line 1331
Scary issue, am I right? I certainly was a bit terrified and immediately thought that I would have to upgrade the CMS manually. This made me shudder on the inside and I began to panic. One source told me to try to find the default values for the memory limit and adjust it to either 16 MB or 24 MB. I thought that this was a wonderful idea, but none of the methods of approach worked for me. In fact, I caused Error 505′s to pop up a few times. A part of me panicked again, and was fearing that I wouldn’t be able to keep my site up to date.
I had realized that the problem paralleled with the resource issue I have had recently with FireFox. My install of FireFox has been running very sluggish and draining many resources lately and I realized it had come from the abundant number of addons I had installed and enabled for my browser. I decided to give the idea a shot with WordPress, EXCEPT that rather uninstalling the plugins, I disable them. Lo and behold, this post has been written from WordPress 2.9 
EDIT: Not only does this upgrade pertain to version 2.9 of WordPress, but any version of WordPress.
If anyone is having any troubles with their upgrade or are having a similar problem and didn’t find the above methods clear, feel free to leave a comment. Also, if anyone has any alternatives to the problem, feel free to let me know and I will update this post accordingly, with name and site cited as a source.
Hi Brett,
thanks for the suggestion. That worked for me.
I got 24 active plugins and after deactivating 5 of them the upgrade to 2.9 worked like a charm.
All the stuff otherwise mentioning to increase memory_limit didn’t help.
Thanks for this easy solution. My blog is up and running … hurray
Stefan
You’re very much welcome! Thank you for reading. I am glad this helped solve your upgrade problem. If you have any other questions about WordPress, please feel free to drop me a message.
Cheers,
Brett
Any idea which plugins were you problem ones?
Colin,
I run well over 30 plugins, but I would guess that you would want to temporarily deactivate plugins that would utilize more resources. Maybe try deactivating Akismet, Stats, contact forms, or anything that you can think of that is rather resource hungry.
I just ran a bulk deactivate on all of my plugins and it seemed to fix the problem. Out of all of my plugins, the only thing I had to do was re-enable Google Sitemaps and WP SuperCache and then re-apply my API key for stats. All other settings and defaults in all of the other plugins I use were fully intact otherwise.
I have a few other sites I’ve been working on where I could do some experimenting. If you’d like to know all of the plugins I use, let me know. I’ll take some screen shots and send them your way.
Cheers,
Brett
I got a similar error message after doing automatic upgrade to 2.9 but now am unable to get into the wp-admin to disable the plugins and try the install again. How do I get into the admin now that it only gives me the error message when I try to go there now?
It sounds like that your browser still has you as logged in. You could either A) try logging into a different browser or B) clearing the cache in your current browser and restarting it. What sounds like is happening is that your logon session is remembering that it was the page you last visited. I just opened up the wp-admin in a different browser at one point to see that my install was still intact, which it was, so I just cleared out my cache in my default browser and was able to login and attempt upgrading again.
If you are still having an issue, send me an email at brett.widmann@gmail.com and I would love to help you in your attempt to solve this issue.
Cheers,
Brett