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Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2007 17:01:17 -0600
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Subject: Pre-Destructor magic function?
From: nathanael@gnat.ca ("Nathanael D. Noblet")

Hello,
   I have a case where an object has a few variables, a couple of which 
are objects which hold references back to this object.

So very simply something like

class A {
   var B
}

class B {
   var A
}

When doing something like so

$obj = new A(); in a loop the object's never released from memory 
because of the internal references it holds. __destruct is not called 
until the end of script execution etc. Now normally in a web request 
situation this isn't a big deal. However I'm using it in a batch and 
loop over 22 000 records. Since re-assigning the single object I use 
isn't freeing any memory it consumes quite a bit. I have gotten around 
it by creating a special function in the object to manually release the 
recursive references. However it would be nice if there were some sort 
of 'magic' function that could be called on an object so that it knows 
it is being deleted, sort of like a __preDestruct or something like 
that... Is that a bad idea? Or I guess better able to handle recursive 
references in objects would be the other way to solve it I guess.

Any feedback is welcome.

-- 
Nathanael D. Noblet