PHP Composer update "cannot allocate memory" error (using Laravel 4)

This error can occur when the composer process is trying to allocate more memory than is available to it. There are a few ways you can try to resolve this issue:

1. Increase the amount of memory available to PHP. You can do this by adding the following line to your php.ini file:

memory_limit = 512M

2. Use the --no-scripts flag when running composer update. This will prevent any scripts from running during the update, which can help if one of the scripts is using too much memory.

composer update --no-scripts

3. Use the --prefer-dist flag when running composer update. This will cause Composer to download a zip file of the package, rather than cloning the entire repository. This can help reduce the amount of memory needed during the update.

composer update --prefer-dist

4. Use the COMPOSER_MEMORY_LIMIT environment variable to increase the memory limit for Composer only.

COMPOSER_MEMORY_LIMIT=-1 composer update

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I hope these suggestions help! Let me know if you have any questions or if you need further assistance.