Please provide a short reproduce case.
From the code I see that the refcount IS increased when needed.

I hope this is short enough:

http://pastebin.com/33jqgfP8

As you can see there's a $GLOBALS line commented out. If you remove the comments, it will work as expected. If that line is commented the event is garbage collected and event_base_loop returns 1.

Although it could be considered a feature that when an event leaves regular php scope, I do consider this un-php-like. I expect to be forced to manually call event_free.

Does this make sense? Otherwise I'll happily add more details.


Off-topic: I noticed you're the main developer for this package. I have some burning questions, is there any chance I can email you directly?

In any event, thank you for checking this out!

Sorry it took so long, could you plz try the patch attached?
I know it does fix this particular issue and I'm more concerned about the things it 
might break instead.

No worries about the timeframe :).

At the time (nearly 2 years ago) I was just experimenting with libevent, but it never really went beyond the experiment.

So I'd be happy to try the patch, although it would be limited to just trying out my simple test case from this bug report, I don't have a 'real' system to test this with.

Let me know if this would still help you, I will definitely try it then.

That's exactly the problem here - I don't have a real system to test it, since I don't 
use libevent extension myself =)

Hi,

My tests are succeeding with this patch. I'm going to attempt to also contact someone in the community; Hopefully to get a second eye on this.

I just tried the proposed patch and ran it through the script[0] we have in 
reactphp for detecting leaks. The patch causes memory usage to keep increasing, as 
such I would say that the patch causes a memory leak.

If you need help setting up the test case for reproduction, you can find me in 
#reactphp on freenode.

[0]: https://github.com/reactphp/react/blob/master/examples/test-memory.php

Yes, would be nice to a have a working reproduce script.
The one from github doesn't work atm: require('./examples/../vendor/autoload.php): 
failed to open stream: No such file or directory

Yeah, it depends on composer[0] to fetch the dependencies and install generate the 
autoload file. I can help you run composer, or make a standalone zip if that 
helps. Just let me know.

[0]: http://getcomposer.org/

Do you really need a whole framework for that?

Granted, for a standalone project with no dependencies it may seem like overkill. 
As soon as you depend on 10+ packages and need to configure autoloading manually, 
you will know why. Composer adoption is huge, I think it's safe to say that it's a 
de-facto standard in the PHP community (as far as that is possible in PHP).

Either way, I've made a `vendors` branch on my fork[0] of the repo which includes 
vendors+autoload.php. You should be able to check that out and run `php 
examples/test-memory.php`. I hope that helps!

[0]: https://github.com/igorw/react/tree/vendors

No feedback was provided. The bug is being suspended because
we assume that you are no longer experiencing the problem.
If this is not the case and you are able to provide the
information that was requested earlier, please do so and
change the status of the bug back to "Open". Thank you.

Feedback was provided!

I'm gonna close this as the libevent package on PECL had no had a release for 4 years, and there haven't really been much acitivity since. If development picks back up then this report should be re-opened