I have a download script that streams the contents of multiple files
into a zip archive before passing it on the to browser to be
downloaded.  The script uses file_get_contents() and gzdeflate() to
loop over multiple files to create the archive.  Everything works
fine, except I have noticed that for a large number of files, this
script will exceed the php memory limit.  I have used
memory_get_peak_usage() to narrow down the source of the high memory
usage and found it to be the two above methods.  The methods are used
in a loop and the variable containing the file data is unset() and not
referenced in between calls.  The script peak memory usage for the
script should be a function of the single largest file that is
included in the archive, but it seems to be the aggregate of all
files.

Here is the pseudo-code for this loop:

header( /* specify header to indicate download */ );
foreach( $files as $file )
{
  echo zip_local_header_for($file);
  $data = file_get_contents( $file )
  $zdata = gzdeflate( $data );
  unset($data);
  unset($zdata);
}
echo zip_central_dir_for($files);

If I remove either the gzdeflate and replace the file_get_contents()
with a fread() based method, the script no longer experiences memory
problems.

Is this behavior as designed for these two functions (because PHP
scripts are usually short lived)?  Is there a way to get them to
release memory?  Is there something I'm missing?   Thanks.

-- Ryan

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