title: How does garbage collection work in PHP? Namely, how do local function variables get cleaned up?
body: <p>If I assign a value to variable that is not declared global inside a function will that variable be unset automatically when function terminates or will it only be unset when the PHP script finishes executing?</p>
  
  <p>I'm trying to determine if it's smarter to unset temporary, function scope variables within the function manually or to not worry about because they will be automatically unset by the PHP engine.</p>