php memory de-allocation

[rsatd]

So after doing a spot of googling, I haven't found a good answer for this.

Got a script that runs daily on a client that operates on 500 records at a time. It fetches them and stores them in an object. What's the sensible way of clearing this object? What it does is this:

$obj = fetch500
while(more_records) {
   $obj = fetch500
   doStuff
}

Which is fine since the obj gets overwritten inside the while loop, but after the loop finishes, I want to clear the memory of this object. Should I use unset or set the object to NULL? Or something else that I am not aware of?

Yes I can increase memory limits... but I would prefer not to have a massive memory intensive script running daily xD.

 

[rsatd]

Oh yeah its not that much but it is for the environment in question. And I would rather improve the script rather then blindly increase memory limits. Those records generate a 15-20mb object when loaded (there are other overheads as we have to do soap calls and such and such, but anyway that's not the issue here.

Was mostly asking for a sensible way to clear memory used by the variable (or mark it up for garbage collection) that is no longer needed while staying in the same function scope.