PHP made me upset today. I’ve noticed this issue for a while, and it’s been addressed in forums, but few know of what seems to be the second most common reason for it. First, check the symptoms of you ill-returned web document. Does it ever popup as a download dialog box instead of the usual I-trust-you-Zend handling? Did you then download it only to find it is nothing more than a blank page? Stop sifting through your http.conf file! Stop changing those permissions! Well, you could do all this, but it’s most likely not the problem. For me, it was the amount of memory I had allocated to PHP script execution, specifically the memory_limit value. Oddly as it sounds, sometimes giving your PHP a little more memory seems to clear up this problem right away. Works so far for me with all the times I’ve seen this issue. You can either change the value in your ini file as:

memory_limit = 32M

…in your .htaccess file like…

php_value memory_limit = 32M

…or directly in your PHP file if you wanted to.

ini_set('memory_limit', '32M');

Hopefully, this can help someone out there.