Back-end Performance

Chapter 2: How to Read Big Files with PHP (Without Killing Your Server)

by Chris Pitt

It’s not often that we, as PHP developers, need to worry about memory management. The PHP engine does a stellar job of cleaning up after us, and the web server model of short-lived execution contexts means even the sloppiest code has no long-lasting effects.

There are rare times when we may need to step outside of this comfortable boundary — like when we're trying to run Composer for a large project on the smallest VPS we can create, or when we need to read large files on an equally small server.

It’s the latter problem we'll look at in this tutorial.

The code for this tutorial can be found on GitHub.

Measuring Success

The only way to be sure we’re making ...