PHP generator class and $pages->find()

[Guy Verville]

First of all, I'm not an expert on PHP. I recently read about generators and I understand their usefulness in avoiding loading a set of objects into an array to the point of saturating the memory.

The $pages->find() call is known to be greedy (and slow) when it comes to processing large amounts of pages, because it loads all objects into memory.

Is there a way to use a generator to avoid this problem? Is there a workaround? I know that $pages->findMany() exists, but it is also called greedy.

See https://secure.php.net/manual/en/language.generators.php

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator

[LostKobrakai]

Generators are PHP 5.5+ so it won‘t fit for ProcessWire, which is still running down to PHP 5.3. But the new $pages->findMany() works similarly to how generators work.

[Guy Verville]

I was under the impression that findMany() was loading everything into memory. Maybe I'm wrong...  I will do some tests, thanks.

[LostKobrakai]

The reason for adding findMany() was to not load all pages into memory like find() does. It does so by harnessing PHP iterators to load batches of pages within a foreach loop and discard already computed batches to free up memory again.