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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T14:59:57+00:00

I’m creating a script that makes use of the $GLOBALS variable quite a lot.

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I’m creating a script that makes use of the $GLOBALS variable quite a lot. Is there too much you can put into a variable?

If I have a lot of information stored in $GLOBAL variable when the page loads, is this going to slow down the site much or not really?

Is there a limit to how much information one should store in a variable? How does it work?

And would it be better to remove information from that variable when I am done with it?

Thanks for your help! Want to make sure i get this right before I go any further.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    In PHP, there’s a memory_limit configuration directive (in php.ini) that you should be aware of.

    As meder says, you should really be taking a step back and re-evaluating things. Do you actually use all of those data on each and every web server request.

    In almost every case, you’d be better off loading only the data you need, when you need it.

    For instance, even if you’re reading all this data from some file, instead of a database, you’re probably better off splitting that file up into logical groups, and loading the data you need (once!), just before using it (the first time).

    Assuming you’re running Apache/mod_php, loading everything on every request will balloon the size of your httpd processes, and when you scale with traffic, you’ll just start swapping out (which means your app will slow to a crawl, or even worse, become deadlocked) that much faster.

    I you really need all or most of the data available for all (or nearly all) requests, consider looking into something like memcache. You can devise ways to share (read-only) data between processes, instead of duplicating it for each and every request.

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