Diagnosing Memory Leaks - Allowed memory size of #

Question

I've encountered the dreaded error-message, possibly through-painstaking effort, PHP has run out of memory:

Allowed memory size of #### bytes exhausted (tried to allocate #### bytes) in file.php on line 123

Increasing the limit

If you know what you're doing and want to increase the limit see memory_limit:

ini_set('memory_limit', '16M');
ini_set('memory_limit', -1); // no limit

Beware! You may only be solving the symptom and not the problem!

Diagnosing the leak:

The error message points to a line withing a loop that I believe to be leaking, or needlessly-accumulating, memory. I've printed memory_get_usage() statements at the end of each iteration and can see the number slowly grow until it reaches the limit:

foreach ($users as $user) {
    $task = new Task;
    $task->run($user);
    unset($task); // Free the variable in an attempt to recover memory
    print memory_get_usage(true); // increases over time
}

For the purposes of this question let's assume the worst spaghetti code imaginable is hiding in global-scope somewhere in $user or Task.

What tools, PHP tricks, or debugging voodoo can help me find and fix the problem?

Answer 1

I recently noticed that PHP 5.3 lambda functions leave extra memory used when they are removed.

for ($i = 0; $i < 1000; $i++)
{
    //$log = new Log;
    $log = function() { return new Log; };
    //unset($log);
}

I'm not sure why, but it seems to take an extra 250 bytes each lambda even after the function is removed.