A problem has been bugging me for quite a while now. Occasionally when working within the WordPress admin pages, checking the stats, updating posts, etc, a blank, all white page will be returned. When this happens the following error is output to the logs.

PHP Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 42467328) (tried to allocate 67105 bytes) in (docroot)/wp-content/plugins/jetpack/modules/stats.php on line 448

If you’ll notice, WordPress isn’t exactly asking for the moon. It’s using about 40MB of memory, and only asking for 70KB more. Surely, I should be well in the clear with this, especially since I’ve configured every memory setting I can think of upwards of 256MB.

This is a pretty common problem with the PHP script serving the WordPress site requiring more memory than is available or allowed. There are a number of suggested fixes, described below, but none worked for me, and I managed to simply work around the issue (by deactivating plugins) for quite a while. This wasn’t altogether satisfactory, and today I had no ‘superfluous’ plugins to deactivate, so I dug deeper into the world of hosting and PHP multi-user configuration.

Thankfully, I found the silver bullet, and have (hopefully) banished the White Screen of Death forever. If you’ve encountered the same problem, simply follow the steps below to solve the issue.

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