parsing - PHP application running out of Memory

Question

I am writing a set of classes for a crawler, it crawls a start page, pulls three links based on parameters (found using Simple Html Dom Parser allowing use of jquery like selectors), crawls those pages, then goes to page 2, picks the next 3 pages. Current max pages is 57 times.

Needless to say I am getting:

Allowed memory size of 50331648 bytes exhausted error message.

Is there any way I can avoid running out of memmory.

To let you know, after pulling in the contents of the first page, I run a go() function, which continuosly pulls in the pages until $this->maxpages is reached. I suppose I could run the loop when instantiating the classes, but would this help.

Answer 1

You can adjust the memory limit:

ini_set('memory_limit', '128M');

But I'd try to make the script use less memory. Make sure you are freeing data / references to anything that no longer needs to exist.

memory_get_usage() can be useful in debugging where the memory usage is accumulating.

Also, if you aren't using PHP 5.3, you may consider upgrading since its garbage collector is better.