memory limit weirdness on 4.4.7

[TheKog]

Got a quickie for the gurus. I've been testing on 2 servers both with GD2 and 4.4.7 php. Working on some image resizing code and it worked like a champ on serverA, but ran out of memory on serverB. The ONLY diff on the 2 servers wa that one had php compiled with the "experimental" memory-limit stuff on -- of course this is the one where the code broke during image processing.

 

What I am observing is scary -- without the "experimental" memory-limit option compiled in it appears the max_memory for a script is completely ignored -- is this TRUE?????????

 

Empiracal results say yes it's true -- can the gurus please confirm?

Thanks in advance.