Reduced Memory Usage

First of all, the whole idea of implementing the garbage collection mechanism is to reduce memory usage by cleaning up circular referenced variables as soon as the prerequisites are full-filled. In the implementation in PHP this happens as soon as the root-buffer is full, or when the function gc_collect_cycles() is called. In the first diagram we display the memory usage of the following script in both PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3 excluding the base memory that PHP uses itself when it starts up:

<?php
class Foo
{
        public $var = '3.1415962654';
}

$baseMemory = memory_get_usage();

for ( $i = 0; $i <= 100000; $i++ )
{
        $a = new Foo;
        $a->self = $a;
        if ( $i % 500 === 0 )
        {
                echo sprintf( '%8d: ', $i ), memory_get_usage() - $baseMemory, "\n";
        }
}
?>

In this very academic example we are creating an object of which a property is set to point back to the object itself. When the $a variable in the script is re-assigned in the next iteration of the loop, a memory leak would typically occur. In this case two zval-containers are leaked (the object zval, and the property zval), but only one possible root is found—the variable that was unset. When the root-buffer is full after 10.000 iterators (with in total 10.000 possible roots), the garbage collection mechanism kicks in and frees the memory associated with those possible roots. This can very clearly be seen in the jagged memory-usage graph for PHP 5.3. After each 10.000 iterations the mechanism kicks in and frees the memory associated with the circular referenced variables. The mechanism itself does not have to do a whole lot of work in this example, because the structure that is leaked is extremely simple. From the diagram above you see that the maximum memory usage in PHP 5.3 is about 9 Mb, whereas in PHP 5.2 the memory usage keeps increasing.

Run-Time Slowdowns

The second area where the garbage collection mechanism influences performance is when the garbage collection mechanism kicks in to free the "leaked" memory. In order to see how much this is, we slightly modify the previous script to allow for a larger number of iterations and the removal of the intermediate memory usage figures. The script now looks like:

<?php
class Foo
{
        public $var = '3.1415962654';
}

for ( $i = 0; $i <= 1000000; $i++ )
{
        $a = new Foo;
        $a->self = $a;
}

echo memory_get_peak_usage(), "\n";
?>

We will run this script two times, once with the zend.enable_gc setting turned on, and once with it turned off:

time ~/dev/php/php-5.3dev/sapi/cli/php -dzend.enable_gc=0 \
    -dmemory_limit=-1 -n part3-example2.php
# and
time ~/dev/php/php-5.3dev/sapi/cli/php -dzend.enable_gc=1 \
    -dmemory_limit=-1 -n part3-example2.php

On my machine the first command seems to take consistently about 10.7 seconds, whereas the second command takes about 11.4 seconds. This is a slowdown of about 7%. However, the maximum amount of memory used by the script is reduced by 98% from 931Mb to 10Mb. This benchmark is not very scientific, or even representable for real-life applications, but it does demonstrate the memory usage benefits that this garbage collection mechanism provides. The good thing is that the slow down is always the same 7% (for this particular script), while the memory saving capabilities continue to save more and more memory the more circular references are found during the execution of the script.

Let's now have a look at non-academic situation. I first started looking for circular reference collecting algorithms when I found out that while running the tests of the eZ Components' Template component with PHPUnit I ended up swapping a lot, and rendering my machine useless in the process. In order to do some benchmarks for this article, I re-ran those same tests with an empty php.ini file to disable the overhead and memory allocation that Xdebug was creating while doing code-coverage analysis.

The memory usage dropped with 95% from 1.7Gb to 75Mb memory consumption and the run time as reported by PHPUnit increased from 2:17 for the non-GC enabled run to 2:33 for the GC enabled run—an increase of about 12%. However, with the non-GC enabled run, PHP sat there doing "nothing" for almost 15 seconds. Upon investigation with the Unix debugger GDB I noticed that those 15 seconds were all spend on freeing memory allocated for objects inside the PHP runtime. The actual time that the script ran was about the same in the end.

PHP's Internal GC Statistics

It is possible to coax a little bit more information about how the garbage collection mechanism is run from within PHP. But in order to do so, you will have to re-compile PHP to enable the benchmark and data-collecting code. You will have to set the CFLAGS environment variable to -DGC_BENCH=1 prior to running ./configure with your desired options. In case you have compiled PHP before, the following sequence should do the trick:

export CFLAGS=GC_BENCH=1
./config.nice
make clean
make

When you run the above example code again with the newly built PHP binary, you will see the following being shown after PHP has finished execution:

GC Statistics
-------------
Runs:               110
Collected:          2072204
Root buffer length: 0
Root buffer peak:   10000

      Possible            Remove from  Marked
        Root    Buffered     buffer     grey
      --------  --------  -----------  ------
ZVAL   7175487   1491291    1241690   3611871
ZOBJ  28506264   1527980     677581   1025731

The most informative statistics are displayed in the first block. You can see here that the garbage collection mechanism ran 110 times, and in total more than 2 million memory allocations where freed during those 110 runs. As soon as the garbage collection mechanism has run at least one time, the "Root buffer peak" is always 10.000.

Conclusion

In this final and last installment we had a quick look at the performance implications of the garbage collection mechanism that is now part of PHP 5.3. In the general case, it will only cause a slow down when the cycle collecting algorithm actually runs, whereas in normal (smaller) scripts there should be no performance hit at all.

However, in the cases that the cycle collection mechanism does run for normal scripts, the memory reduction it will provide allows more of those scripts to run concurrently on your server as not so much memory is used in total.

The real benefits are only there for longer running scripts such as lengthy test suites or daemon scripts. Also, for PHP-GTK applications that generally tend to run longer than scripts for the Web, the new mechanism should make quite a bit of a difference regarding memory leaks creeping in over time.