Fatal Error: How to Increase Memory Limit

Question

I am trying to use the Khan Academy API but I am running into a small problem. I believe the data being returned by the API call is too large for the variable that is holding the data. I did some Googling and came across a method that sets memory_limit equal to -1. I tried this but it did not seem to work for me. Here is the error I am receiving:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 125829120 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 86 bytes) on line 20

Line 20 refers to $array = json_decode($output, true);

Here is my full code:

<?php
ini_set('memory_limit', '-1');

$options = array(
       CURLOPT_URL => "http://www.khanacademy.org/api/v1/topictree",
       CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
);

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt_array($ch, $options);
$output = curl_exec($ch);

$array = json_decode($output, true); //Saves the returned JSON object as a multi-dimensional array

foreach ($array as $key => $subarray) {

    if ($subarray['readable_id'] == 'financial-crisis-in-thailand-caused-by-speculative-attack') {
        echo $subarray['readable_id'];
    }
}
?>

Answer 1

try this :

<?php
ini_set('memory_limit', '128M');

Answer 2

memory_limit = 16M in php.ini. Some servers like godaddy's are php5.ini. Whichever one you are using. Change the value to be as big as you need.

https://drupal.org/node/29268

This link is information for drupal. But, should work around the board.