After installing a number of modules, I suddenly lost access to the Administer>>Modules configuration menu item. The page wouldn't load or would load blank. After much frustration and no help from my web host, I discovered it was the PHP memory setting. Once increased in htaccess beyond the basic 8M, module list loaded just fine.

Given the proliferation of contributed modules, it seems likely that people will want to install more than just the core modules of Drupal and will run into the same problem I did. A more experienced programmer probably would have figured this out in no time, but rolling out the next Drupal release with a higher initial PHP memory setting in .htaccess would save less knowledgeable installers a lot of headaches.

Comments

kbahey’s picture

kbahey commented

This happens because the admin/modules page loads ALL modules it finds, whether enabled or not.

By definition this is a memory intensive operation.

Your suggestion of putting a new setting in .htaccess will work only for a few cases, since many ISPs do not allow the memory settings to be overriden on shared accounts.

The workarounds are:

- Delete some unneeded modules the modules/ and sites/*/default/modules directories
- Increase the memory in php.ini
- Use split mode (something that is still under discussion in the development community).

markus_petrux’s picture

markus_petrux commented

Not sure if this has been discussed before, but...

Yeah, the fact that drupal needs to load all modules looks kind of overkill. Wouldn't it be easier to read the .module files rather than including them?

.module files could come with a standard header (ala wordpress plugins/themes) with all relevant information to list the entries in the modules report.

...or maybe normalize the format of the README files for that purpose.

...or something to that effect. So, there would be no need to load everything just to browse the list of modules, heh.

markus_petrux’s picture

markus_petrux commented

I think this is being addressed by the install system:
http://drupal.org/install-system-overview

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

install system is the way to go.