[eluser]tonanbarbarian[/eluser]
I am not sure that the ability to disable buffering would save any memory, unless they implement it differently.
The output of a typical page is only a few tens of kbytes. The issue would be making sure that if the buffering is disabled that the code that handles the buffering is never loaded.
From my experience it is not the data that is in memory that is problem it is the code that is being loaded and processes.
For your page that is 1.2M in size, if you were to display that memory usage, and then immediately unset every variable in memory then display the memory usage again I would suggest you would free no more than 200 - 300K probably taking you back to 1M
Actually I just tried that on my site without much difference at all
Peak Memory usage: 1840612 (1.755M)
Memory Usage at end of execution: 1756940 (1.676M)
Unset all variables: 1756380 (1.675M)
As you can see even the difference between the peak memory usage and the unset is 84232 or 82K
So out of the 1.755M used to process my request only .08 was actual data in memory. Now I do not know how efficient unset is at reclaim data but these figures do suggest that most of that 1.7M of memory was used by php to load, parse and execute the script, not for storage of data.
I have also noticed in similar experiments and testing I have done, in particular when trying to minimise the memory used by CakePHP, that the less code loaded the less memory used, however there is not a direct correlation between the size of the scripts files and the amount of memory used but if you look at all of the files loaded in the above example their total file size is much less than 1.7M
My above example is loading 61 files for a total of 318754 bytes or 311K yet it uses 3 - 4 times that amount of memory to process the page.
Anyway just my observations... the less code you load the less memory you use.
