A common issue I see Rackspace customers with is there PhpMyAdmin not having enough memory, often I ‘ll see countless tickets where the memory_limit is increased for phpmyadmin, and when one of their virtualhosts falls over, it is then decreased for all of the sites, until someone wants to use phpmyadmin again.

not very good really is it? Actually, fixing this is quite easy. Lets provide a php.ini for phpmyadmin that only phpmyadmin uses;

# Copy original php configuration
cp /etc/php.ini /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/php.ini

# Modify /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/php.ini so that the following variable is set as a higher value
memory_limit = 256M

Naturally if you now goto the customerwebsite.com/phpmyadmin/php.ini you’ll see a nice php file waiting for you… not good… we need to protect the php.ini file as it can expose stuff we don’t want to be seen; lets make it as hard to find out the server configuration and hide php.ini altogether.

# File to edit may differ but it can be any file inside conf.d make one if you like call it phpini.conf or something
vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf

<Files php.ini>
          Order allow,deny
          Deny from all
</Files>

Dont’t forget the most important step

# Check apache syntax
apachectl -t

# Restart the apache process
apachectl graceful

Another pretty simples thing to do. That isn’t pretty simple until you do it.