[phplib] PHP and recursion From: Roy Huggins (roy <email protected>)
Date: 05/31/01

Hola.

My question is not related to PHPLib specifically, for which I apologize. But
the members of the list have oft displayed good knowledge of the underworkings
in PHP and I'd like to get some insight into something I've run into recently.

I recently built a pair of classes whose purpose is to create a tree of TreeNode
objects in which each node has one parent, many children and an array of
arbitrary data. Performing operations on these trees uses a lot of recursion, of
course. Upon testing one function that traverses the tree, creating an array of
path illustration strings through the tree (i.e. $paths[0] ==
"root:node1:node2", $paths[1] == "root:node1:node4:node7"), PHP quit while
complaigning about using too much memory. My script was using a whopping 8 megs!

I examined my code to see if I was doing something stupid to fill up the RAM and
didn't find anything (which, of course, doesn't mean it isn't there. :) But I
wanted to get some more info on how PHP deals with recursion and whether or not
people have any comments/caveats to express on the issue. I've been spoiled by
Scheme and find that recursion is wonderful at times. I'd like to know if it's
really a good idea to use it that much in PHP.

Thanks in advance!

Regards,
Roy Huggins
roy <email protected>
http://www.royhuggins.com/employability

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