I still remember the version number: WordPress 4.7. That's when I properly started my journey as a WordPress developer. Not as a "I read a tutorial and now I'm an expert" kind of start — more like a "I broke a client's site three times before lunch" kind of start.
Those were good years, honestly. I built a lot of sites. Small business sites, portfolio sites, e-commerce stores. But there was one problem that followed me across almost every single project, like a background process that never quits: the media library.
Sites would crash. Uploads would eat up server resources. And every now and then, out of nowhere — the dreaded white screen of death, right after someone in the client's team uploaded "just one more file."
Every time this happened, I went into the same routine. Open the error logs, check the wp-content/uploads folder, check PHP memory limits, and dig line by line until I found the culprit.
And more often than not, the answer was almost embarrassingly simple:
