Memory usage climbs with every request until the PHP process is killed, or a long-running worker exhausts memory over time. I trace exactly what holds memory — static caches, unclosed resources, large result sets, or a loop that accumulates data.
Find what causes PHP memory usage to grow until the process dies.
Tracked a memory leak in a long-running PHP worker at Cenoskop — a Symfony command that accumulated Doctrine entity references in a static cache over 12+ hours. Found it using tideways heap snapshots comparing memory at hour 1 vs hour 6. The fix was a 3-line change to detach entities after processing.
You share memory usage data (or I add profiling for a sampling run). I compare heap snapshots at different points, find what's retained between requests or growing over time, and point at the exact code path. Most cases resolve in one focused session.
Investigation and a written diagnosis with the fix location. Implementation is quoted separately.
Yes. Frameworks and caches grow predictably per request up to a plateau. A real leak keeps climbing past the plateau until PHP-FPM kills the worker. I distinguish the two.
Yes. Memory profiling and heap snapshots let me see what's retained between requests without a restart.
Other problems I help with.
Profile and optimize PHP applications that are slow, memory-heavy or consuming too much CPU.
Details →Diagnose why a PHP application is slow, no rewrite required.
Details →Find and prioritize the real bottlenecks across your full backend stack.
Details →Relevant production work.
Custom solution for collecting and evaluating traffic metrics with emphasis on processing speed and minimizing backend load.
Designed and built the backend for fast traffic metric collection and evaluation.
Crawler monitoring millions of products. Processing 30M products daily and comparing them.
Built and maintain the full crawling pipeline — from scraping through Elasticsearch indexing to price comparison.
Price intelligence engine for the US market. Processing large-scale product data.
Built the data pipeline and crawling infrastructure for large-scale US product monitoring.
Chat application with end-to-end encryption.
Built the backend and encryption layer for a secure chat application.
Find a job or offer your services.
Built the Go backend — API, matching logic and deployment.
Describe the problem in a few lines — I'll look at it and tell you what I think.