[TYPO3-core] Memory system woes

[Christian Kuhn]

Hey.


I would like to sort out some issues on the php memory usage of our 
application.


First, in general, memory consumption is a secondary problem that 
heavily decreased in time. When the 'load only parts of TCA in cached 
frontend' code was done in TYPO3 10 years ago, servers had something 
around 500MB or maybe 1 gig of memory. And they were expensive. Now, 
every sane server for 50 euros/mont has 32 gigs. My mobile phone has 2 
gigs. There is exactly no point in restricting any php applications to 
something stupid like 8MB. A gig doesn't harm much in shared hosting 
environments in 2013 if configured correctly. Only stupid hoster 
restrict this to something insane. Thus, it doesn't matter if we use 8 
or 11MB in frontend-full-cache scope.

Additionally, the PHP memory consumption decreased heavily with the 
versions. We realised that with our unit tests, executing all master 
5000 tests. According to phpunit output:

php 5.3.3 -> ~950 MB
php 5.3.15 -> ~450 MB
php 5.4.5 -> ~350 MB

With increasing available memory, needed memory by php decreases.

There is just no point in talking about memory increase of a hand full 
of megabytes used by php for frontend requests now.


Disclaimer: This does not mean that memory shouldn't be optimised at 
all. If our application does something insane that can be solved more 
elegantly with less memory consumption: Go ahead, we love those patches!


Regards
Christian