The PHP memory limit for the command line is 50M, which comes from the default wgMemoryLimit, which is a lower bound ("MediaWiki will try to raise PHP's memory limit if it's below this amount").

That can be too low in some cases when a few extensions are loaded.

The command line limit is actually set to -1 in /etc/php5/cli/php.ini . However, due to an issue with phpsh (https://github.com/facebook/phpsh/issues/49), that gets set to -2M, which MW then raises to 50M.

The solution is to set /etc/php5/cli.php.ini to something suitably high, specified in megabytes. For comparison, the Apache php.ini have 128M. It might also be good to set wgMemoryLimit to the same value, just so people don't get confused reading the setting files.

Version: unspecified
Severity: normal
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34241