What are the potential pitfalls of using the fread function in PHP for reading data byte by byte from a stream, especially in high-load scenarios?

Potential pitfalls of using the fread function in PHP for reading data byte by byte from a stream in high-load scenarios include increased memory usage and slower performance due to reading data one byte at a time. To mitigate these issues, it is recommended to read data in larger chunks using fread with a specified buffer size.

$handle = fopen("example.txt", "rb");
$bufferSize = 1024; // Set the buffer size to read data in chunks of 1KB
while (!feof($handle)) {
    $data = fread($handle, $bufferSize);
    // Process the data read from the stream
}
fclose($handle);