Question: I got this error when running `composer.phar update` on my VM:

> 
> PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 1073741824 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 144115188075867549 bytes) in phar:///bin/composer.phar/src/Composer/Util/RemoteFilesystem.php on line 179
> 
> 
> 

The `composer.json`, if needed:

```
{
        "description" : "The CodeIgniter framework",
        "name" : "codeigniter/framework",
        "license": "MIT",
        "require": {
                "php": ">=5.2.4",
                "videlalvaro/php-amqplib": "2.5.*"
        },
        "require-dev": {
                "mikey179/vfsStream": "1.1.*",
                "videlalvaro/php-amqplib": "2.5.*"
        }
}

```

The VM just recently recovered from a bad disk sector problem, and the guy running the VM said that the VM has been moved to a new disk. There are only Java, PHP, httpd, postgre, rabbitmq and the website itself in my VM, and it already ran perfectly for about 4 months before this happened. I'm using PHP 5.6.11. Can anyone help please?

Answer: 
The solution that works both on local environment but also in a container (e.g. in a build stage of a pipeline) where composer might be installed in tricky way, is 

```
COMPOSER_MEMORY_LIMIT=-1 composer install

```
Nothing worked for me except putting `memory_limit = -1` in `php.ini` file.