I was trying to install a very large file (6MB) as a template on Joomla and even after I have changed the PHP.INI settings, I could not do the install.

After a lot of research I have found one forum post  that gave part of the idea of what’s happening, but did not gave-me an idea how to fix it.

Everytime that the file was being uploaded, I have checked the error log and I got the following error:

FATAL: emalloc(): Unable to allocate 11918129 bytes

What was happening was that the site account was under a shared hosting account and the PHP.INI settings of the site was getting in conflit with the shared hosting PHP.INI settings (this is at least the best guess). Anyway, the file was not being uploaded and I could not install the template.

Here’s how we did trick the system to fix it.

If we could not allocate x amout of bytes of memory because the file was too large, make it smaller. I changed all the images to 1kb file size. The image folder was the biggest one. After that I have re-uploaded the file and it was 100% sucessfull.

After the sucessfull install, I have accessed the website by FTP and replaced the files with the correct ones.

If you are getting this error, or is getting an error like: Unable to upload file from the extension manager on Joomla 1.53, this trick might help you.