How to destroy an object?

Solution 1:

You're looking for unset().

But take into account that you can't explicitly destroy an object.

It will stay there, however if you unset the object and your script pushes PHP to the memory limits the objects not needed will be garbage collected. I would go with unset() (as opposed to setting it to null) as it seems to have better performance (not tested but documented on one of the comments from the PHP official manual).

That said, do keep in mind that PHP always destroys the objects as soon as the page is served. So this should only be needed on really long loops and/or heavy intensive pages.

Solution 2:

A handy post explaining several mis-understandings about this:

Don't Call The Destructor explicitly

This covers several misconceptions about how the destructor works. Calling it explicitly will not actually destroy your variable, according to the PHP5 doc:

PHP 5 introduces a destructor concept similar to that of other object-oriented languages, such as C++. The destructor method will be called as soon as there are no other references to a particular object, or in any order during the shutdown sequence.

The post above does state that setting the variable to null can work in some cases, as long as nothing else is pointing to the allocated memory.