Description:
------------
Hello together,

I'm currently trying to find a heap corruption while using Horde and 
noticed a rather odd behavior. The supplied code is the standard way 
Horde does it singletons. We always used the syntax of "$object = 
&new class" to make it work  with PHP4 and PHP5. 

If I change that to "$object = new class", everything works as 
expected. I've found bug #32845 and noticed what we are doing seems 
wrong, so Horde needs fixing.

The problem gets worse if the class object contains a variable of the 
type "PEAR_Error", which contains cyclic references. Not only does 
the constructor get called every time, the object leaks memory like 
hell, even with PHP 5.3. I've searched through the bugtracker and 
thought the garbage collector now handles cyclic references,
but maybe this is a side-effect of something else going wrong.

Is the memory consumption by design?

Thanks in advance for any comment,
Thomas


Reproduce code:
---------------
<?php

require_once "PEAR.php";

class Horde_History
{
    var $error;

    function &singleton()
    {
        static $history;

        if (!isset($history)) {
            $history = &new Horde_History();
        }

        return $history;
    }

    function Horde_History()
    {
        $this->error = PEAR::raiseError("error");
        echo "Memory usage: " . memory_get_usage() . "\n";
    }
}

for (;;) {
    $a = Horde_History::singleton();
}


Expected result:
----------------
Constant memory usage.

Actual result:
--------------
Increasing memory usage.