Describe the bug

In 5.2.3 exporting streams data straight to the client while 6.x writes to the file system. Once the export is complete in 6.x, the entire file is then sent at once to an output buffer spiking the memory.

I believe this to be a regression. Because of unpredictable ram spikes, the app cannot be deployed to a restricted kubernetes environment.

I have not looked at the code but the regression is present in the latest snapshots as of July 2026.

How to Reproduce

1. Export plain or gzipped, behaves the same
2. If in a containerized env with memory limits and if the export is large enough a ram spike at the end of the export will cause the orchestration system to kill the app.
3. My 330MB plain text dump spikes the ram to 1100 MB, 70MB gzipped dump spikes it to 300 MB. Idle container is ~25MB

Expected behavior

Streamed output

Screenshots

No response

Operating System

Linux

Web Server

nginx fastcgi pass to php-fpm

Database Server

MariaDB

Database version

No response

PHP version

tested with 8.4-latest

phpMyAdmin version

6

browser

No response

Additional context

No response