How to correctly close an Entity Manager in doctrine

Question

I was having a memory leak problem in a Doctrine2 script that was aparently caused by a piece of code that was supposed to eliminate memory problems.

Before I knew you could (and should) clear the Entity Manager, every 20 iterations i did the following:

if ($this->usersCalculated % 20 == 0) {
   $this->em->close();
   $this->em = \Bootstrap::createEm();
   $this->loadRepositories();
}

And the Bootstrap::createEm looks like this:

public static function createEm() {
    $em = EntityManager::create(Bootstrap::$connectionOptions, Bootstrap::$config);
    $em->getConnection()->setCharset('utf8');
    return $em;
}

The reason that I recreated the Entity Manager in the first place was because my UnitOfWork was growing wild and I didn't know about the $em->clear() method.

So, even if my current memory leak seems solved at the moment (or at least reduced), i still have to create a new Entity Manager whenever I need to do a separate insert/update query without relying that someone else do the flush. For example, whenever I send an email, I insert a row in the database to indicate so, and the code looks like this:

    $emailSent = new \model\EmailSent();
    $emailSent->setStuff();
    // I do it in a new em to not affect whatever currentunit was doing.
    $newEm = \Bootstrap::createEm();
    $newEm->persist($emailSent);
    $newEm->flush();
    $newEm->close();

From what I've learned from before, that leaves some memory leaked behind.

So my question is, what am I doing wrong here? why is this leaking memory and how should I really close/recreate an entity manager?

Answer 1

Have you tried:

$this->em->getConnection()->getConfiguration()->setSQLLogger(null);

I've read that this turns off the SQL Logger which is not cleared and sometimes produces memory leaks like you are experiencing.