preg_match_all() and other preg_*() functions doesn't work well with very long strings, at least longer that 1Mb.
In this case case function returns FALSE and $matchers value is unpredictable, may contain some values, may be empty.
In this case workaround is pre-split long string onto parts, for instance explode() long string by some criteria and then apply preg_match_all() on each part.
Typical scenario for this case is log analysis by regular expressions.
Tested on PHP 7.2.0