Allowed mem size exhausted

I have the following code that generates the following error. I am using this code to prepare a zip or tar.gz file as an email attachment. Can someone suggest a better / more efficient way to do this and maybe avoid the error??? I believe that the file that generated this error was about 1.8MB. 6 $fp = fopen($path.$filename, "r"); 7 $content = fread($fp, filesize($path.$filename)); 8 $attachment = base64_encode($content); 9 $attachment = chunk_split($attachment); Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted at (null):0 (tried to allocate 2228273 bytes) in /home/user/public_html/dir/subdir/include/functions.php on line 9 Many thanks! Shawn