CodexBloom - Programming Q&A Platform

PHP 8.2 Memory Leak When Using Recursive Functions with Large Arrays

πŸ‘€ Views: 184 πŸ’¬ Answers: 1 πŸ“… Created: 2025-06-22
php memory-management recursion PHP

I'm having a hard time understanding I'm optimizing some code but After trying multiple solutions online, I still can't figure this out... I've been banging my head against this for hours. I'm experiencing a memory leak scenario when using a recursive function to process a large multidimensional array in PHP 8.2. The function is supposed to flatten the array, but during execution, it seems to consume an excessive amount of memory, leading to a fatal behavior: `Allowed memory size of X bytes exhausted`. I've tried increasing the memory limit in my `php.ini` file to `memory_limit = 512M`, but it still crashes for larger arrays. Here's the code I'm using: ```php function flattenArray(array $array) { $result = []; foreach ($array as $item) { if (is_array($item)) { $result = array_merge($result, flattenArray($item)); } else { $result[] = $item; } } return $result; } $largeArray = [ [1, 2, 3], [4, [5, 6, [7, 8]]], 9, [10, [11]], // Assume there are many more nested arrays here ]; $flattened = flattenArray($largeArray); ``` I've also tried using `yield` with a generator to handle the recursion, but that doesn’t seem to resolve the memory scenario either. The recursive depth gets very high with larger inputs. Is there a more efficient way to achieve this without hitting memory limits? Are there any best practices or design patterns I should consider for flattening large arrays in PHP? I'm working on a web app that needs to handle this. Thanks in advance! For context: I'm using Php on Windows. Any help would be greatly appreciated! I recently upgraded to Php 3.9.