efficient coding to save memory usage

jpmoriarty

I run some sites on my computer as a test bed, as I'm sure most people do. my computer was being a little akward last night, so i had a look at the task manager and was surprised to see that "Apache.exe" was using over 300 megabytes of memory, apparently. Now i'm sure most of that had probably been chucked into a page file, but it did get me to thinking...

Are there steps that i should be taking to make sure that my sites arent necessarily wasting resources? Should, for example, I always close database connections at the end of a page or site? If so, how? Should I be using pconnect (as i have occasionally) to connect to the DB or not? And what about variables and the like - should i be unsetting them or destroying them when i'm done with them?

The sites arent terribly complicated - no huge array's or anything. It's just an online seat reservation system for a school play, so i was a little surprised to see the resources being consumed. Help me to become a more efficient coder!

superwormy

You should always close the database connection at the end of the script.

mysql_close() if you're using MySQL, otherwise, look it up :-)
www.php.net/mysql_close

Generally you dont' need to use mysql_pconnect() ( persistent connections ) basically if you arn't sure that you should be using it, you probably shouldn't be :-) The PHP manual has a better explanation. You also have to be really careful with pconnect() because on a server with a higher load you could use up all the connections to the database, and pages will start to die on connect to your database.
www.php.net/mysql_pconnect

I assume you're under Windows, I wouldn't worry about the memory too much, Apache may have been freaking out or some other freak happening. Does it consitently use 300mb, and further, does it use this much only after you've run scripts or even just right after you start Apache?