Understanding PHP's Garbage Collection and Memory Management Mechanisms
In PHP versions prior to 5.3, memory cleanup relied solely on basic reference counting without a dedicated garbage collector (GC). It simply checked if a variable’s zval (Zend value container) had a refcount of 0; if so, it freed the memory, otherwise it retained the block until the PHP process terminated. This naive approach worked for simple ...
Posted on Fri, 17 Jul 2026 16:24:36 +0000 by MasK