Two years ago, PHP's package manager, Composer, was sped up by disabling the garbage collector: http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2014/12/what-about-garbage.html http:

Two years ago, PHP's package manager, Composer, was sped up by disabling the garbage collector: http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2014/12/what-about-garbage.html http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2014/12/what-about-garbage.html (Or more accurately the cycle collector. You can't turn off reference counting.)