Hi David,
This sounds like Doctrine is caching its results in memory. As Ratchet is a long-running application, unlike most PHP websites, this behaviour would usually be desired. I'm not an expert on Doctrine, but I believe you would have to explicitly clear its cache.
Also, it's usually not a good idea to run sql queries in a Ratchet application. As multiple clients are on a single event loop, a single blocking sql query would make all connected clients wait for that one call.
Cheers.