[geon]

The code becomes kind of weird when you have to second guess the language.

Now, the approach PHP takes is fine for the original vision of the language. It even works great.

But languages designed for long running processes often have some sort of mechanism for dealing with that situation explicitly. Like the `NSAutoreleasePool` in Objective C. In C++ you might build your own custom slab allocator.

I'd say the garbage collector is one of the problems with PHP. Then again, if you run into it, PHP might not be the right tool for that particular job.