Moodle 4.5.3 (Build: 20250317) restore course fails with memory exhausted

I was trying to restore a course backup from DEV to PROD 

But the restore kept failing with memory available exhausted.

i keep increasing the memory_limit in php.ini with no luck

at 512MB

```

PHP Fatal error:  Allowed memory size of 536870912 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 262144 bytes) in /var/www/html/moodle/backup/util/plan/base_task.class.php on line 241

```

at 1024MB

```

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 1073741824 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 262144 bytes) in /var/www/html/moodle/backup/util/helper/backup_general_helper.class.php on line 49

```

even tried all the way to 2048 - still it fails

It's only a 4.5MB backup file, why is so much memory needed ?

• Or perhaps i have some other misconfigurations ?

Appreciate any advice ... thanks