Question

Ive noticed when working repeatedly with large amount of data in php/mysql the browsers memory usage increases very quickly.

eg running firefox 4, single tab open with just the app im testing is currently using over 800MB of ram.

The testing involved repeatedly loading over 500KB from mySQL via PHP while loops per refresh of the page or ajax call, I am assuming this is causing the memory buildup?

Is there a way I can reduce this?

Answer 1

Parse less data (and send less HTML), it’s the only solution to use less memory

Anyway to check the usage of memory you can use memory_get_usage();

Replying to your question title, to stop while loop

while($r=mysql_fetch_*($query)) {
    if (memory_get_usage()>YOUR_LIMIT_BYTE_HERE)  {
        echo 'red alarm here';
        break;
    }

}