Comment by Mithaldu

As far as i understand composer is roughly the same thing as the cpan client. And they just simply disabled the garbage collector for it.

What is this guy doing that he needs gigabytes of memory to install a bunch of php libraries?

    Before: Memory usage: 2194.78MB (peak: 3077.39MB), time: 1324.69s
    After:  Memory usage: 4542.54MB (peak: 4856.12MB), time:  232.66s