Got the message in my WordPress dashboard today that WordPress 3 was available to upgrade to, “Awesome” I thought, so I clicked the upgrade button and got ready to use the new version of WordPress….

But a problem arose while trying to upgrade and I kept getting the error:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2516315 bytes) in /home/mydomain/public_html/blog/wp-includes/http.php on line 1363

OMG! So now it would be a case of doing a manual upgrade, which I hate doing as it seems to be such a cumbersome method, so after checking with a friend, who’s in the know with these sort of things they recommended me doing the following to make this work.

1. Open up the file wp-settings.php which is in the main directory of your WordPress installation
2. Find the line that reads define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’32M’);
3. Change it to define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’);
4. Then start the upgrade process again.
5. Hopefully everything should have updated for you.

The problem is memory limit and by doing the above you give your PHP a little more memory to play around with and therefore giving WordPress that extra elbow room it needs to update correctly.

Please note, I’m not a PHP expert, so please BACK UP you WordPress installation before any upgrade that you make.