Laravel Artisan Hangs using Memory Until Freeze

With Laravel 5.4 Artisan will not run and uses a lot of memory, it worked a long while before with the same versions (besides PHP 7.0.14 to 7.0.15 maybe?).

Problem: any $ ./artistan command does nothing. While watching htop I notice the memory climb from 2gb to 4gb very quickly. Once I cancel it, it jumps back down.

What Im Using

• Ubuntu Linux Xenial x64 (Local Development)
• Apache2.4
• MySQL 5.7
• PHP 7.0.15
  • Laravel 5.4
  • Composer 1.3.2

PHP Extensions Loaded

[PHP Modules]
bz2
Core
ctype
curl
date
dom
exif
fileinfo
filter
gd
gettext
hash
iconv
igbinary
imap
intl
json
libxml
mbstring
mcrypt
mysqli
mysqlnd
odbc
openssl
pcntl
pcre
PDO
pdo_mysql
PDO_ODBC
Phar
posix
readline
redis
Reflection
session
shmop
SimpleXML
soap
sockets
SPL
standard
sysvmsg
sysvsem
sysvshm
tidy
tokenizer
wddx
xml
xmlreader
xmlrpc
xmlwriter
xsl
Zend OPcache
zip
zlib

[Zend Modules]
Zend OPcache

Things I've Tried:

• Removed the bootstrap/cache/config.php file.
  • composer dumpautoload
  • composer self-update
• The Artisan commands don't work below
  • php artisan clear-compiled
  • php artisan optimize
  • php artisan optimize --force

My Guess I'm guessing I have a PHP extension enabled causing the problem but I wouldn't know which -- Please let me know if you have any ideas or clues.

Thank you!

via JREAM