The mysterious “blank” page in WordPress admin

I’ve run across this problem many times in my career with WordPress – suddenly the page-edit.php screen or the page-new.php screen starts loading up blank. This is a very common problem that has a LOT of solutions. Deactivate plugins, deactivate your theme, and so on. But for the first time ever, this was not the problem for me.

After some creative sleuthing, I discovered that if I had less than 56 pages in the database the problem went away. This naturally led me to check PHP’s memory limit, and sure enough it was set to 16M! I also turned on errors and got this lovely note: “Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 16777216 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 58368 bytes) in /wp-admin/menu-header.php on line 84”

So short story shorter, check your memory limit! 16M is pretty small for any website running off a database. Â I would just like to add that to the long list of things to check. Â Here’s a good article on increasing memory limit.