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0 pointsStefanKarpinski4y ago0 comments

Heck, this is the entire memory management model of PHP, which I found shocking when I learned it, but makes sense given that the language is intended to generate web pages: just allocate, never reclaim the memory, then kill the process when you’re done.

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coder5434y ago· 1 in thread

Do you have any sources? Maybe some truly ancient version? PHP has done garbage collection (seemingly mixed with some reference counting, like Python) for at least 10 or 15 years... I didn't bother to keep searching for even older information, but nothing I saw indicated that PHP only released memory when the process for a request exited.

I don't even think most mainstream uses of PHP have done the process-per-request model for decades, but I could be wrong.

tored4y ago

Correct, garbage collector was added to PHP 5.3, prior to 5.3 PHP did only reference counting. PHP 5.3 was released in June of 2009.

Here is a series of articles that describes it in detail

https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.gc.php

Especially look at this example where the same script is executed with and without GC

https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.gc.performance-consid...

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