a single field from reference entity causing memory error
Should anyone come across this, I had failed to mention that it was an image field. The problem what the image style that I had used. I have the imagecache_actions module for the aspect switcher functionality. Somehow the style I was using had the circular reference. I had to copy another style to that style in features in order to event edit the style. Then I was able to recreate the style properly and the problem is fully gone.