MySQLi query results: Best approach, do you close, free, both?

Question

I have some questions about using MySQLi, queries, and related memory management. The code here is just to clarify my questions, so don\'t dump on it for error checking, etc. I

Answer 1

When I assign the results of the second query to $results, what happens to the memory associated with the previous results?

When you execute this:

$results = $db->query($query);

If there was something in $results before, this old content cannot be accessed anymore, as there is no reference left to it.

In such a case, PHP will mark the old content of the variable as "not needed anymore" -- and it will be removed from memory when PHP needs some memory.

This, at least, is true for general PHP variables; in the case of results from an SQL query, though, some data may be kept in memory on the driver-level -- over which PHP doesn't have much control.

Should I be freeing that result before assigning the new one?

I never do that -- but, quoting the manual page of mysqli_result::free:

Note: You should always free your result with mysqli_free_result(), when your result object is not needed anymore

It probably doesn't matter for a small script... And the only way to be sure would be to test, using memory_get_usage before and after calling that method, to see whether there is a difference or not.

Related to 1, when I do clean up at the end, is cleaning up just the last results enough?

When the scripts end:

• The connection to the database will be closed -- which means any memory that might be used by the driver should be freed
• All variables used by the PHP script will be destroyed -- which means the memory they were using should be freed.

So, at the end of the script, there is probably really no need to free the resultset.

When I do try to clean up a result, should I be freeing it as above, should I be closing it, or both?

If you close the connection to the database (using mysqli::close like you proposed), this will disconnect you from the database.

Which means you'll have to re-connect if you want to do another query! Which is not good at all (takes some time, resources, ... )

Generally speaking, I would not close the connection to the database until I am really sure that I won't need it anymore -- which means I would not disconnect before the end of the script.

And as "end of the script" means "the connection will be closed" even if you don't specify it; I almost never close the connection myself.