I am using Freeform. My captcha was working fin and then it suddenly became a broken image. When I view source in Firefox there is no code where the captcha image should be. In IE there is code in the source.

When I copy the url and load it in a different window I get a broken image icon.

On the server side images/captchas is 777 and each captcha file in the folder is 644. The captchas that are not loading are in the folder but they have a file size of 0 bytes. Looks to me like whatever is writing the image is failing in some way.

I have read the KB article here.

Any ideas on tracking down this strange captcha/Freeform problem?

By the way...some of the captchas worked and those are about 2k in size.

This problem is still happening. The image file is writing but it is empty. It is sporatic as earlier today it was working just fine. Seems to come and go. If it is happening it seems to happen for a long time rather than randomly working. What I mean is that it seems that something just switches in the server that cause it to stop working for hours at a time.

A sporadic problem is very odd.  I’d either think something is blipping server side- but I can’t really imagine what.  Or- could be you are right on the php memory limit and sometimes go over, sometimes not.  How much php memory do you have allocated?  Should be able to spot it in ‘PHP Info’ in Admin- Utilities.

If that’s not it, we’ll need to dig a bit deeper and see if we can discern any sort of pattern to the oddness.

Memory limit is set at 8M.

I turned on “Display template debugging” and when I load a page or submit a template I am at 3M - 4.5M even with captcha turned on for logged in members. BY the way, the captcha is showing up now. I should wait until it does not show up and see then.

Do you think 8M sounds low if the reported memory usage with debugging turned on is 4.5M?

Yep- it’s low IMO.  I’d bump to at least 16 and I personally prefer at least 32.  Depends on if you’re doing much with images- image manipulation sucks up a lot of memory.  But 8 is definitely low.  See if you can get it bumped up.  Might clear the issue up.