Paul Jones has posted his thoughts about factory behavior in PHP applications (well, really any kind of application as it's a pan-language concept). He suggests that factories should only create the objects requested and not persist them.

In a recent Reddit conversation, some of us went off on a tangent about factories. I maintained then, and do now, that a “factory” always-and-only returns a new instance. If you have a “factory” that returns anything other than a new instance, it’s not a factory alone. In the case of factory methods, it is a factory + accessor; in the case of factory objects, it is a factory + registry. A “factory” (whether a factory method or factory object) is one way to separate object creation from object use.

He gives an example of a case where an object needs to be created for a "doSomething" method. His first example shows the creation of the "Item" inline, mixing the creation and use of the object into the same place. He replaces this with a "factory" class/method that only returns the new "Item" requested. He points out that a factory method that retains the object (like as a class property) has the same problem as the first example - retention. Instead he suggests an intermediate "collaborator" that splits out the creation and retention once again.