Is there a way to...get single variable memory usage

[s_shrum]

Is there a way to check how much memory is being used by a variable?

I'm doing various things to a very large string in a variable and want to display the final size when I'm done.

I can't use get_memory as that takes in a ton of other factors as well.

Is there a way to get the mem usage of a single variable at any specific time? I guess I could do strlen() * 8 to get byte size but is that right?

Add: actually I guess it would be just the strlen() for bytes size...*8 for bit size :rolleyes:

TIA

[halojoy]

yes

this is one thing I would like to know, too
[RIGHT]anybody,
somebody
anyone
someone
anylovely
somelvely
anyyou
someyou
Weedsmoker?
leatherbag?
laterwhite?

halojoy
is dying to know answer
here

How much memory in bytes
does my variable $x_variable use
????
????
???
??
?

. [/RIGHT]

:mad: 😕 :mad:

[toplay]

The answer lies in how much you can comprehend about PHP internals (C language).

All PHP variables are zval's (a C structure). If you look at the _zval_struct C structure, you'll see that there are a bunch of extra bytes (variables) used to store information about each PHP variable. For instance, is_ref indicates whether this zval actually holds data or is simply a reference to another zval that holds data. Another interesting variable is the refcount. You can read about it in Figure 9-6, but basically when a variable falls out of scope, or when the variable is destroyed, its reference count is decremented by one. When the refcount reaches zero, it is picked up by the garbage collection system and its contents will be freed.

hth.

EDIT:

When I said "falls out of scope" I mean like when a variable is defined in a function and that function is returned from (ends).

FYI - See debug_zval_dump() function.

.