I can confirm that this function triggers a garbage collection. I have a script that exceeded 128MB of memory at some point and ended with a fatal error. I was confused, because the script dealt with some large files initially, but the memory load from that point on should have been marginal, and the error occurred at the very end.
Those large files were dealt in a dedicated function and i even used unset() on the variable holding the file after the file was written to disk inside that function. So the memory should have been cleared twice, first after the unset() call, and second once the function ended.
To debug the memory usage, I called memory_get_usage(true) at some points and echo-ed the memory allocation. Just by adding a few echos here and there in the script, the memory usage never exceeded 1MB overhead (on top of the current file size) and the memory error disappeared.
