Does using static methods and properties in PHP use less memory?

Look static vs singleton tests: http://moisadoru.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/static-call-versus-singleton-call-in-php/

Note: for some reasons, stackoverflow didn't show multilne topic, so i'm adding a picture.

Number of runs  Singleton call time (s)     Static call time (s)
100             0.004005                    0.001511
1,000           0.018872                    0.014552
10,000          0.174744                    0.141820
100,000         1.643465                    1.431564
200,000         3.277334                    2.812432
300,000         5.079388                    4.419048
500,000         8.086555                    6.841494
1,000,000       16.189018                   13.696728

Checkout more details here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3419411/260080

When you declare a class method/variable as static, it is bound to and shared by the class, not the object. From a memory management perspective what this means is that when the class definition is loaded into the heap memory, these static objects are created there. When the class's actual object is created in the stack memory and when updates on the static properties are done, the pointer to the heap which contains the static object gets updated. This does help to reduce memory but not by much.

From a programming paradigm, people usually choose to use static variables for architectural advantages more than memory management optimization. In other words, one might create static variables like you mentioned, when one wants to implement a singleton or factory pattern. It provides more powerful ways of knowing what is going on at a "class" level as opposed to what transpires at an "object" level.