[Phpug] Performance: Static versus Intance Methods

[Michał Słaby]

On Wed, 2008-04-09 at 20:23 -0400, kprichard wrote:
> I'm jumping into this thread a bit late, but thought the conversation
> was worth following up on.  You say,
> 
> > In fact, objects in PHP are blazing
> > fast and fairy lightweight. Objects are so fast, that Zend Engine
> > developers advise to wrap arrays in objects to gain speed:
> >
> This made me very curious - there's been an ongoing debate about
> obtaining best PHP performance at my workplace.  So, I copied your two
> foreach() constructs and extended them to perform four tests:
> 
> 1) iterate simple array with for(),
> 2) iterate simple array with foreach(),
> 3) iterate an ArrayObject with foreach(),
> 4) iterate an ArrayObject with the built-in iterator methods.
> 
> Script below, here are results produced on a Solaris x86 box w/PHP
> 5.2.0/Zend v2.2.0, running from CLI-
> 
> 1. 0.0024580955505371
> 2. 0.0039119720458984
> 3. 1.1935360431671
> 4. 1.2200510501862
> 
> These ratios are pretty consistent, test after test, though perhaps
> splitting the script into four separate files would be a fairer test.

Indeed, I ran your test on Linux 2.6.24-x86 and PHP 5.2.4 and got:
1. 0.00915884971619
2. 0.00682306289673
3. 2.44940495491
4. 2.58817601204

This is really surprising to me, so I made simplified test:
$a1 = array();
$a2 = new ArrayObject();

for ($i = 0; $i < 1000; ++$i) {
	$a1[] = 1;
	$a2[] = 1;
}

$t = microtime(true);
foreach ($a1 as $item) ;
echo (microtime(true) - $t) . "\n";

$t = microtime(true);
foreach ($a2 as $item) ;
echo (microtime(true) - $t) . "\n";

The results were:
0.0125710964203
0.0390491485596

It is still slower, but by a more reasonable factor.
I based my previous posting on advice given by Adam Trachtenberg in book
Upgrading to PHP5 - http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/upgradephp5/
He claims that iteration over ArrayObject is faster than old fashion
arrays.

However, numbers don't lie, so let's agree that array()s are still
faster.


Regards,
Michael