I was doing some testing with some cache files we use and found some
shocking memory usage with big arrays. Basically, when creating a large
array in a verbose manner using $CATEGORIES[2]["name"] = "foo"; syntax,
the memory usage was much higher than other methods. For the particular
file I was using, it was 5MB (verbose code) vs. 1.1MB (var_export
format) vs. 900k (serialized).
All my test code is at http://dev.phorum.org/bigarray.tar.gz and more
details are in my blog post at
http://doughboy.wordpress.com/2007/02/26/big-arrays-in-php/.
I didn't want to post this to the bug list as I don't know that it is a
bug. This may be expected behavior. But, I figured it would not hurt
to point it out. Maybe something obvious can be done to fix this? I am
not an advanced C coder or I would dig in to the code myself.
--
Brian Moon
http://dealnews.com/
It's good to be cheap =)