Cron failing after 4.6.16 upgrade

Question

Platform: Wordpress 4.5.2 | PHP version: 5.5.9 | Mysql: 5.6.30 | Running: Ubuntu 14.04.4

Yesterday I successfully upgraded to CiviCRM 4.6.16, no errors during upgrade, everything went smoothly, except the cron job is failing with the next error:

PHP Fatal error:  
  Allowed memory size of 262144 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 1920 bytes) in
  /var/www/site/public_html/wp-content/plugins/civicrm/civicrm/bin/cli.class.php
  on line 226

PHP memory limit is set to 512M

line 226 at civicrm/bin/cli.class.php

The cron job runs every 5 minutes and looks like this:

php /var/www/site/public_html/wp-content/plugins/civicrm/civicrm/bin/cli.php -s site -u user -p password -e Job -a execute

If I run the job from the API explorer, it runs successfully with no errors, it also runs successfully if I execute a job with Execute now in the Scheduled jobs page.

Any input is highly appreciated.

Answer 1

So CLI's memory limit was set to -1 like this:

memory_limit = -1 // no memory limit

Setting the limit to other than no limit solved the issue.

I'm not sure why this happened as CLI's memory limit was always set to -1 from the very first day I configured this server 2 years ago.