volgens Mike Jaroch.
Yes I checked it's getting called from /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini I have also looked for .htacess files.
Have tried setting it in bytes, M and G. cleared cache, restarted apache and even rebooted. It has to be getting over written some place. Checked and max execution time won't change either. Has to be a file some place that is over riding my settings. since the max memory stays at 128M I have grep -r 128 /etc and not found anything. Might need to do the same thing to my moodle directory.
Really starting to wonder if it started when I migrated to mpm-evem and php5-fpm. Never had this issue before. Of course the performance boost made the change well worth doing.