Description:
------------
I ran into problems with the memory leak with domxml. I am working on a very old and very large website and am unable to upgrade to PHP5 until I have converted all of the old code, so I am writing my code to be compatible with both PHP4.3.2 and PHP5. After much searching, I located a bug report at http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=30911&edit=1 that mentioned $doc->free(), but I could not find any documentation for this function. I later found a very good description in the below post on http://us2.php.net/domxml-open-mem. This fixed the problem, but it would make life easier for other people with the same problem if the $doc->free(); function was documented.

ej at campbell *dot* name
30-Nov-2003 07:54
<!-- quote -->
The DOM XML parser does not automatically free memory when a DomDocument goes out of scope.

If you're using the DOM parser to parse several XML files as part of a long running script, you must free the DomDocument manually or a memory leak will occur.

To free a DOM document allocated by domxml_open_mem, do the following:

$doc = domxml_open_mem("$contents");

$doc->free();
<!-- end quote -->