cPanel x86_64 Reseller unable to Add Packages

Using 64bit is really common now in fact most hosts are using this on their newer systems due to using more than 4GB of memory.  On cPanel there is a common problem that crops up with errors showing up after a while in WHM for resellers after there is quite a few accounts on the server.  cPanel sets the memory limit relatively low and on 64bit systems int’s and such are using more memory due to the 64bit system.  cPanel added a feature which allows you to set a maximum amount of memory used by a cPanel process before it is killed.  As a result in 64bit systems they’re more frequently hitting the modest 256MB limit while 32bit systems do not run into this issue as often.  The reseller user will receive the following error when adding a package:

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

The user will see this error over and over again when adding the package.  There is also an error in the cPanel error_log which I cannot remember at this point as we had a machine give this error a while back.  The thing is we know what causes it now so I did not bother checking the error_log of cPanel.  So all you need to do is go into tweak settings and find the following setting:

The maximum memory a cPanel process can use before it is killed off (in megabytes). Values less than 256 megabytes can not be specified. A value of “0” will disable the memory limits.

We typically set this value at 768-1024 MB on our higher end systems (12GB ram total).

Do not feel bad if you did not know as I honestly did not until I made a ticket with cPanel support.  Even then at the time they needed to login to figure out what was causing it.  It’s really not a well documented problem but it seems to be coming up more often now.  You probably see the same thing with other applications and even the languages themselves.  For example PHP the memory limit of 32MB is really problematic on 64bit systems which is why we use 128MB.