In a new blogpost published at Sitepoint, Christopher Pitt explores the various ways you can handle reading big files in PHP.

Though this isn’t a problem we frequently suffer from, it’s easy to mess up when working with large files. In asynchronous applications, it’s just as easy to bring the whole server down when we’re not careful about memory usage.

This tutorial has hopefully introduced you to a few new ideas (or refreshed your memory about them), so that you can think more about how to read and write large files efficiently. When we start to become familiar with streams and generators, and stop using functions like file_get_contents: an entire category of errors disappear from our applications. That seems like a good thing to aim for!

https://www.sitepoint.com/performant-reading-big-files-php/