PHP 8.1 Memory Leak When Handling Large XML Files with SimpleXML
I've looked through the documentation and I'm still confused about I'm working on a project and hit a roadblock. I'm working with a memory leak scenario when processing large XML files using SimpleXML in PHP 8.1. My script is designed to read an XML file, parse it, and store specific elements into a database. However, with files larger than 50MB, the script runs out of memory, and I receive the behavior: `PHP Fatal behavior: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 20480 bytes)`. I've attempted to increase the memory limit in `php.ini` by setting `memory_limit = 256M`, but it still fails for larger files. Here’s a simplified version of my code: ```php $xml = simplexml_load_file('large_file.xml'); foreach ($xml->item as $item) { // Assume each item has a title and a description $title = (string) $item->title; $description = (string) $item->description; // Insert into database (using PDO) $stmt = $pdo->prepare('INSERT INTO items (title, description) VALUES (:title, :description)'); $stmt->execute([':title' => $title, ':description' => $description]); } ``` The memory usage peaks significantly during the parsing phase, and from what I understand, SimpleXML loads the entire XML file into memory. I tried switching to `XMLReader`, but I encountered issues with reading the content correctly. Can anyone suggest a more memory-efficient way to parse large XML files in PHP? I would appreciate any tips on best practices or design patterns that might help alleviate this question. I'm working on a service that needs to handle this. Has anyone else encountered this?