Despite much searching, I have not yet found an explanation as to how one can manually free resources from variables, not so much objects, in PHP. I have also seen many comments regarding the merits and demerits of unset() versus setting a variable to null. Thus, here are the results of some benchmarks performed comparing unset() of numerous variables to setting them to null (with regards to memory usage and processing time):
10 variables:
Unset:
Memory Usage: 296
Time Elapsed: 1.0013580322266E-5
Null set:
Memory Usage: 1736
Time Elapsed: 5.9604644775391E-6
50 variables:
Unset:
Memory Usage: 296
Time Elapsed: 3.6001205444336E-5
Null set:
Memory Usage: 8328
Time Elapsed: 3.2901763916016E-5
100 variables:
Unset:
Memory Usage: 296
Time Elapsed: 5.6982040405273E-5
Null set:
Memory Usage: 15928
Time Elapsed: 5.8174133300781E-5
1000 variables:
Unset:
Memory Usage: 296
Time Elapsed: 0.00041294097900391
Null set:
Memory Usage: 168096
Time Elapsed: 0.00067591667175293
10000 variables:
Unset:
Memory Usage: 296
Time Elapsed: 0.0042569637298584
Null set:
Memory Usage: 1650848
Time Elapsed: 0.0076930522918701
100000 variables:
Unset:
Memory Usage: 296
Time Elapsed: 0.042603969573975
Null set:
Memory Usage: 16249080
Time Elapsed: 0.087724924087524
300000 variables:
Unset:
Memory Usage: 296
Time Elapsed: 0.13177299499512
Null set:
Memory Usage: 49796320
Time Elapsed: 0.28617882728577
Perhaps my test code for the null set was flawed, but despite that possibility it is simple to see that unset() has minimal processing time impact, and no apparent memory usage impact (unless the values returned by memory_get_usage() are flawed). If you truly care about the ~4 microseconds saved over <50 variables, more power to you. Otherwise, use unset() to minimize script impact on your system.
Note: Tested on PHP 5.3.8 installed via RPM on Fedora 14
