Caching large Array causes memory exhaustion - php

Question

So I'm trying to cache an array in a file and use it somewhere else.
import.php
// Above code is to get each line in CSV and put in it in an array
// (1 line is 1 multidimensional array) - $csv
$export = var_export($csv, true);
$content = "<?php \$data=" . $export . ";?>";
$target_path1 = "/var/www/html/Samples/test";
file_put_contents($target_path1 . "recordset.php", $content);
somewhere.php
ini_set('memory_limit','-1');
include_once("/var/www/html/Samples/test/recordset.php");
print_r($data);
Now, I've included recordset.php in somewhere.php to use the array stored in it. It works fine when the uploaded CSV file has 5000 lines, now if i try to upload csv with 50000 lines for example, i'm getting a fatal error:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 67108864 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 79691776 bytes)
How can I fix it or is there a possible way to achieve what i want in a more convenient way? Speaking about the performance... Should i consider the CPU of the server? I've override the memory limit and set it to -1 in somewhere.php

Answer 1

There are 2 ways to fix this:
You need to increase memory(RAM) on the server as memory_limit can only use memory which is available on server. And it seems that you have very low RAM available for PHP.
To Check the total RAM on Linux server:
<?php
$fh = fopen('/proc/meminfo','r');
$mem = 0;
while ($line = fgets($fh)) {
$pieces = array();
if (preg_match('/^MemTotal:\s+(\d+)\skB$/', $line, $pieces)) {
$mem = $pieces[1];
break;
}
}
fclose($fh);
echo "$mem kB RAM found"; ?>
Source: get server ram with php
You should parse your CSV file in chunks & every time release occupied memory using unset function.