Memory leak in symfony task

Question

I have issues with symfony 1.4 a task running daily. To make simple the task download an xml then read it.

I have notice that the memory used increase between each "node" in the xml.

For instance, somewhere in the script I do that:

 foreach($prd->ArtistList->Artist as $art)
          {
  echo "start foreach artist  ", memory_get_peak_usage(1), " bytes of ram.\n";
            if(!$artist = ArtistTable::getInstance()->findOneByRoleAndName($art['role'], $art['name']))
            {
              $artist = new Artist();
              $artist->role = $art['role'];
              $artist->name = $art['name'];
              $artist->save();
            }

            if(!$pha = ProductArtistTable::getInstance()->findOneByProductIdAndArtistId($prd_id, $artist->id))
            {
              $pha = new ProductArtist();
              $pha->product_id = $prd_id;
              $pha->artist_id = $artist->id;
              $pha->save();
            }

            $pha->free(true);
            $artist->free(true);
            unset($pha);
            unset($artist);

            echo "end foreach artist  ", memory_get_peak_usage(1), " bytes of ram.\n";
          }
          unset($art);

I can see that between two memory_get_peak_usage(1) end and start, memory used increase... I don't know what else am I supose to do to keep it at a same level...

Do you have any idea how to solve that?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I've monitored slow performances in the past within a symfony application. Found out that those built in ORM's (Doctrine in my case) query methods are really a bad thing, especially within a foreach loop.

I'd suggest you to try using RAW SQL instead.

If you don't know how to use raw sql within symfony this should do the trick

$connection = Doctrine_Manager::connection();
$statement = $connection->prepare('your sql statement');
$statement->execute();
$result = $statement->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_NUM); // or whatever fetch mode you want to use