Preventing evoSearch Memory Exhaustion on Large Evolution CMS Sites

Search is often the first feature to collapse when an Evolution CMS site grows beyond the scale the original build expected. In the reported case, evoSearch on a large site exhausted hundreds of megabytes of memory and crashed while working through cached data structures.

The visible symptom was dramatic:

Allowed memory size exhausted ... assets/cache/siteCache.idx.php

But the real lesson is broader. On larger installs, search problems are rarely solved by increasing the memory limit alone. The better questions are:

• how much content is being scanned per request;
• whether the search layer is loading too much cached structure into memory at once;
• and whether the project has outgrown the original search approach entirely.

For large sites, this usually leads to one of three strategies: narrow the searchable dataset, optimize the indexing behavior, or move to a more scalable search stack. What matters is recognizing the memory exhaustion as an architectural warning, not just a server setting annoyance.