Need for mysql_free_result()?

[Anon]

Are resources created by mysql_query() automatically
freed when there are no more references to them, or
should I call mysql_free_result() on them? I'm likely
to call mysql_query() tens of thousands of times while
generating a single page, so the question appears
to be relevant.

[[deleted]]

Read the definition of mysql_free_result() again.

It clears the resultset. That means that all the results from a query are erased,
and that you'd have to run the query again.

So the correct use of mysql_free_result is:

• Do query.
• process all the results you need to process.
• call mysql_free_results.

[Anon]

This is not what I asked though. I was wondering if
the mysql result set will be freed if I don't call
mysql_free_result, but rather remove all references
to it, e.g. by returning from the function where it was
defined.

This seems like the logical behavior, and the test
I just did verified that this is what happens. This
means that there's no point in calling mysql_free_result()
in a function that is about to return. You only need it
if you're doing a large number of queries within the
same scope and store your result sets in different
variables. My experience with PHP3 tells me that
that something has changed since then. In PHP3 it
was important to call mysql_free_result() in loops,
or PHP would eat RAM like crazy.

[[deleted]]

Removing references to somethings does not make it go away.
When you exit a function in PHP4, everything you created in it is destroyed, so probably the resulset too.

But that does not mean that you can be "lazy" and not clean up the resultset.
People rely way too much on the compiler to clean up because they don't feellike doing it themselves 🙂