Description:
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I discovered a memory leak in my script and so was looking through the database to see if it was fixed in CVS.  That brought me to bug #26982 which is identical to my problem.  The answer given there was that it is expected behaviour, but I don't quite understand why?  I would have expected the behaviour to have an increase in memory usage but than have it stop after the garbage collector catches up.  But, I am instead seeing the memory constantly increase.  This behaviour prevents PHP from being used as a Linux service (which is what I am trying to do) as many php libraries out there use this method to create strings.

Reproduce code:
---------------
<?php
$database = 'mysql';

while (1) {
    $old = memory_get_usage();
    "database_{$database}";
    $new = memory_get_usage();
    echo $new - $old;
    echo "\n";
    sleep(1);
}
?>


Expected result:
----------------
I would expect the memory to go up for a while and then stop as the garbage collector catches up and cleans out the old strings.

Actual result:
--------------
It shows a constant increase of 16 bytes.