Can using a stream in PHP potentially lead to any performance issues or drawbacks that developers should be aware of?

Using streams in PHP can potentially lead to performance issues if not managed properly, as opening and reading from streams can consume system resources. Developers should be aware of properly closing streams after use to free up resources and prevent memory leaks. It is recommended to use the `fclose()` function to close streams once they are no longer needed.

$stream = fopen('example.txt', 'r');
// read from stream
fclose($stream);