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I can't think of a single reason a PHP script like this would need that much memory to serve a single user. Everything big would be handled by the database, what could 500MB possibly be used for?

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They would be applying some search logic in memory in PHP. Depending on what you are doing it does make sense to load in a heap of data from the database then narrow it down in PHP.

That sounds grossly ineffective.

Reminds me of some production PHP I saw once, returned the entire database (`SELECT * from 'db'`) and manually walked through it with a for() loop. It wasn't very efficient at scale.

Yeah, you're right... It's way better to do expensive joins on the database where horizontal scalability is just a fantasy than in the shared-nothing www frontends that can be duplicated in clusters ad infinitum.

If you're building SomeSimpleBasicSite.com and you do this, you're probably a bad programmer. If you're truly facing scalability problems, it's table stakes.

Based on your comments in this thread you're out of your depth, man.

I still can't imagine not find an example of where anybody would want to return 500MB of results to PHP for processing.

I think Kiro meant 500, as in the HTTP status code, due to PHP running out of memory, not 500MB.

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