The Three Devs and a Maybe Podcast, with hosts Michael Budd, Fraser Hart, Lewis Cains and Edd Mann, has posted their latest episode with guest Joe Watkins. In this latest show Joe and the guys talk about handling signals and garbage collection in PHP.

In this weeks episode we have a long overdue catch-up with Joe Watkins. We start off discussion with progress on PHP 7.1 and work Joe has been doing to provide an interface to libui within PHP. We then move on to chat about a couple of interesting RFC’s that are currently under-discussion, followed by managing long-running PHP processes with Supervisor and Unix signaling. Finally, we highlight how Garbage collection works and how PHP implements the concept to help manage memory.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed to get updates on future shows as they're released.

In a new post, Derick Rethans talks about circular references (a reference of a memory structure back to itself) and how they relate to PHP.

Circular-references has been a long outstanding issue with PHP. They are caused by the fact that PHP uses a reference counted memory allocation mechanism for its internal variables. This causes problems for longer running scripts (such as an Application Server or the eZ Components test-suite) as the memory is not freed until the end of the request. But not everybody is aware on what exactly the problem is, so here is a small introduction to circular references in PHP.

He starts by explaining what's so bad about circular references - issues not only with referencing the variable but also with freeing up the resources associated with it. He does suggest some solutions to the issue including garbage collection and cyclic tracing.

In a new post, Derick Rethans talks about circular references (a reference of a memory structure back to itself) and how they relate to PHP.

Circular-references has been a long outstanding issue with PHP. They are caused by the fact that PHP uses a reference counted memory allocation mechanism for its internal variables. This causes problems for longer running scripts (such as an Application Server or the eZ Components test-suite) as the memory is not freed until the end of the request. But not everybody is aware on what exactly the problem is, so here is a small introduction to circular references in PHP.

He starts by explaining what's so bad about circular references - issues not only with referencing the variable but also with freeing up the resources associated with it. He does suggest some solutions to the issue including garbage collection and cyclic tracing.