Avoiding out of memory fatal error when using HTTP_Client or HTTP_Request
6th September 2006
If you fetch large amounts of data (e.g. over 2MB per request) using HTTP_Client (or HTTP_request), you may get “out of memory” fatal errors, especially if:
- memory_limit is set to default 8M, and
- you process multiple pages using single non-reset instance of HTTP_Client object.
This problem can manifest itself by producing fatal error after a couple of cycles of successful page retrieval – but always, if run with the same parameters, after some constant or only slightly variable number of cycles.
In my case the problem was that HTTP_Request (a dependancy of HTTP_Client) was holding in memory all the previously fetched pages of the current session (the ‘history’ feature). To force HTTP_Request to hold only the most recent page, you need to ‘disable’ history after creating the HTTP_Client or HTTP_Request object instance:
- $req = &new HTTP_Client($params, $headers);
- // disable history to save memory
- $req->enableHistory(false);
Hope this helps you.
