[webizen]

Originally Posted by csdco

...

When I run out of memory, say by working with a large data set, PHP reports that the allocated memory was just under 40M. How can this be? I checked the soft limit -- this was set to 400M. I changed this to 4000M and I'm able to perform the same task just fine.

Edit: I also set this to 419430400 so that it would just use 400M defined in bytes and it works as expected. The "M" doesn't seem to be working as expected.

you can verify the softlimit by run 'ulimit -a' in php (see below). iow, make a request such as http://your.server.com/test.php and check the size of virtual memory which should reflect soft memory limit in lsphp5.
# cat test.php
<?php
$ulimit=`ulimit -a`;
echo "<pre>$ulimit</pre>";
?>