In my ORM code I have an Entity with a field fined like so:
//part of entity class Item:
/** @Column(name=\"product_id\", type=\"integer\") */
private $productId
DoctrineProxies\__CG__\Application\Entity\Product
is a proxy class... which means that doctrine doesn't actually fetch the entity from the database (for performance) unless it is needed (i.e. calling $product->getName() those proxy Classes are in a recursive loop with eachother and are VERY large as you saw... most of the information there you don't really need unless you are diving deep ... you should never use print_r ... in the new symfony 2.7+ i think there is a function called dump() in debug mode ... if you use that to print the entity it has loop protection and it just shows reference numbers ... you can also use the \Doctrine\Common\Util\Debug::dump() that also will print out a smaller list than 2^234234234 lines ...