Last week I encountered an issue where the homepage of a WordPress site I manage wouldn’t load and instead I received an error message about memory. The message mentioned php-fpm, which was a new term for me.

To address the problem I searched for the error message on Google and found that it was a well-documented issue on the internet. Most of the articles I came across suggested making changes to PHP and Apache config files to resolve the problem. I spent hours trying different solutions but the problem persisted.

Further investigation revealed that both my CPU and RAM were running at 100%, as per the dashboard of my virtual machine. I then contacted the company who configured my VM for assistance and they suggested that I disable the plugins and theme by renaming their directories.

I followed their advice and renamed all of my plugins’ directories but the problem remained. I then did the same for my theme and to my surprise it worked! My site was finally loading again. It turned out that my theme was the cause of the problem.

To resolve the issue permanently I updated my theme to the latest version and renamed the directory back to its original name. This fixed the issue and my site was up and running without any error messages.

It is worth noting that most of the articles I came across about this problem suggested playing with PHP and Apache config files while the actual issue was caused by the theme.