Are direct access and constant function which high-speed?( or less memory , cpu)
define("FOO","VAL");
print FOO;
print constant(FOO);
Could you give me a sample cord and the reason ,
so I am happy.
edit:
I'm sorry Misunderstood it very much
print FOO or print constant(FOO)
Which is high-speed?
I'm not sure where you got your 2 arguments constant() construct, but the constant() function is a getter that only takes one argument: the constant name you want to retrieve.
define(), on the other hand, defines the value of a constant (setter). Comparing performance of those two functions doesn't make much sense as they accomplish completely different tasks.
I think you misunderstand what constant() is being used for. If you only need to access a constant, do it directly: print FOO;
If you don't know what constant you want to access, you need constant(). I.e. you can do "variable variables" like this:
$name = 'var1';
$var1 = 'value something or other';
print $$name; // prints the value of $var1: 'value something or other' because:
${$name} -> ${"var1"} -> $var1 -> 'value something or other'
I.e. you are substituting the name of the variable through a variable.
You can't do this with constants:
$name = 'CONST1';
define('CONST1', 'value something or other');
print $name; // prints the value of $name: 'CONST1'
You'll need to use constant():
print constant($name); // prints 'value something or other'
When you question speed of such simple operations, it's best to just do some quick&dirty benchmarking and compare the results.
define("FOO", "VAL");
$iterations = 10000;
$start_1 = microtime(true);
for ($i = 0; $i < $iterations; $i++) {
print FOO;
}
$end_1 = microtime(true);
$time_1 = $end_1 - $start_1;
$start_2 = microtime(true);
for ($i = 0; $i < $iterations; $i++) {
print constant('FOO');
}
$end_2 = microtime(true);
$time_2 = $end_2 - $start_2;
printf('"print VAL;" %d iterations: %.5F s', $iterations, $time_1);
print PHP_EOL;
printf('"print constant(\'FOO\');" %d iterations: %.5F s', $iterations, $time_2);
But I doubt that you'll see any significant difference between the two.
Related
I am trying to microptimize the code and I was wondering which is the faster to convert a variable into a boolean:
<?php
$a='test';
$result1 = !!$a;
$result2 = (bool)$a;
?>
I am not worry about code size, just about execution time.
some benchmark here, but it is very inconclusive (tried multiple times), so I am wondering what happens in the source code of PHP to see if they are handled differently:
<?php
$a = 'test';
for($c=0;$c<3;$c++){
$start = microtime(true);
for($i=0;$i<10000000;$i++){
$result = !!$a;
}
$end = microtime(true);
$delta = $end-$start;
echo '!!: '.$delta.'<br />';
}
$a = 'test';
for($c=0;$c<3;$c++){
$start = microtime(true);
for($i=0;$i<10000000;$i++){
$result = (bool)$a;
}
$end = microtime(true);
$delta = $end-$start;
echo '(bool): '.$delta.'<br />';
}
result
!!: 0.349671030045
!!: 0.362552021027
!!: 0.351779937744
(bool): 0.346690893173
(bool): 0.36114192009
(bool): 0.373970985413
(bool)$a means: take $a and cast it to boolean.
!!$a means: take $a, cast it to boolean if it isn't one already, then take the resulting value and flip it, then flip it again.
Not only is (bool) faster to execute (yes, I have benchmarked it; no, you won't notice any difference unless you have millions of such operations), but it's way faster to read. If you need to cast a type, just cast a type; don't use some "clever" hackiness that'll confuse the hell out of whoever has to read your code.
<?php
$a = microtime(true);
$num = 0;
for($i=0;$i<10000000;$i++)
{
$num = $i;
}
$b= microtime(true);
echo $b-$a;
?>
I run this on Ubuntu 12.10 and Apache 2
will give me approx. .50 seconds... when I run an assignment for a million times.. BUT BUT...
the same code, instead of $num = $i ... i go ...
$num = $i + 10; and it now takes almost 1.5 times less time to execute.. around .36 consistently..
How come the simple assignment is taking more, whilst an assignment and adding a 10 over it... takes less time!
I am by no means an expert, but here are my findings:
$s = microtime(true);
for($i=0;$i<100000000;$i++) $tmp = $i;
$t = microtime(true);
for($i=0;$i<100000000;$i++) $tmp = $i+10;
$u = microtime(true);
echo ($t-$s).chr(10).($u-$t);
Results in:
9.9528648853302
9.0821340084076
On the other hand, using a constant value for the assignment test:
$x = 0;
$s = microtime(true);
for($i=0;$i<100000000;$i++) $tmp = $x;
$t = microtime(true);
for($i=0;$i<100000000;$i++) $tmp = $x+10;
$u = microtime(true);
echo ($t-$s).chr(10).($u-$t);
Results in:
6.1365358829498
9.3231790065765
This leads me to believe that the answer has something to do with opcode cacheing. I honestly couldn't tell you what about it is making the difference, but as you can see using a constant value for the assignment makes a huge difference.
This is just an educated guess, based on looking at the latest php source on Github, but I'd say this difference is due to function call overhead in the interpreter source.
$tmp = $i;
compiles to a single opcode ASSIGN !2, !1;, which copies one named variable's value to another named variable. In the source, the key part looks like this:
if (EXPECTED(Z_TYPE_P(variable_ptr) <= IS_BOOL)) {
/* nothing to destroy */
ZVAL_COPY_VALUE(variable_ptr, value);
zendi_zval_copy_ctor(*variable_ptr);
}
$tmp = $i + 10;
compiles to two opcodes ADD ~8 !1, 10; ASSIGN !2, ~8;, which creates a temporary variable ~8 and assigns its value to a named variable. In the source, the key part looks like this:
if (EXPECTED(Z_TYPE_P(variable_ptr) <= IS_BOOL)) {
/* nothing to destroy */
ZVAL_COPY_VALUE(variable_ptr, value);
}
Notice that there's an extra function call to zendi_zval_copy_ctor() in the first case. That function performs some bookkeeping as needed (e.g. if the original variable is a resource, it needs to make sure that resource is not freed until this new variable is gone, etc.). For a primitive type such as a number, there's nothing to do, but the function call itself introduces some overhead, which accumulates over 10 million iterations of your test. You should note that this overhead is normally negligible, because even in 10 million iterations it only accumulated to .14 seconds.
#Kolink's observation about a constant being faster can also be answered in the same function. It includes a check to avoid redundant copying if the new value is the same as the old one:
if (EXPECTED(variable_ptr != value)) {
copy_value:
// the same code that handles `$tmp = $i` above
if (EXPECTED(Z_TYPE_P(variable_ptr) <= IS_BOOL)) {
/* nothing to destroy */
ZVAL_COPY_VALUE(variable_ptr, value);
zendi_zval_copy_ctor(*variable_ptr);
} else {
/* irrelevant to the question */
}
}
So only the first assignment of $tmp = $x copies the value of $x, the following ones see that the value of $tmp would not change and skip the copying, making it faster.
I know of several ways to get a character off a string given the index.
<?php
$string = 'abcd';
echo $string[2];
echo $string{2};
echo substr($string, 2, 1);
?>
I don't know if there are any more ways, if you know of any please don't hesitate to add it. The question is, if I were to choose and repeat a method above a couple of million times, possibly using mt_rand to get the index value, which method would be the most efficient in terms of least memory consumption and fastest speed?
To arrive at an answer, you'll need to setup a benchmark test rig. Compare all methods over several (hundreds of thousands or millions) iterations on an idle box. Try the built-in microtime function to measure the difference between start and finish. That's your elapsed time.
The test should take you all of 2 minutes to write.
To save you some effort, I wrote a test. My own test shows that the functional solution (substr) is MUCH slower (expected). The idiomatic PHP ({}) solution is as fast as the index method. They are interchangeable. The ([]) is preferred, as this is the direction where PHP is going regarding string offsets.
<?php
$string = 'abcd';
$limit = 1000000;
$r = array(); // results
// PHP idiomatic string index method
$s = microtime(true);
for ($i = 0; $i < $limit; ++$i) {
$c = $string{2};
}
$r[] = microtime(true) - $s;
echo "\n";
// PHP functional solution
$s = microtime(true);
for ($i = 0; $i < $limit; ++$i) {
$c = substr($string, 2, 1);
}
$r[] = microtime(true) - $s;
echo "\n";
// index method
$s = microtime(true);
for ($i = 0; $i < $limit; ++$i) {
$c = $string[2];
}
$r[] = microtime(true) - $s;
echo "\n";
// RESULTS
foreach ($r as $i => $v) {
echo "RESULT ($i): $v \n";
}
?>
Results:
RESULT (PHP4 & 5 idiomatic braces syntax): 0.19106006622314
RESULT (string slice function): 0.50699090957642
RESULT (*index syntax, the future as the braces are being deprecated *): 0.19102001190186
Hey there. Today I wrote a small benchmark script to compare performance of copying variables vs. creating references to them. I was expecting, that creating references to large arrays for example would be significantly slower than copying the whole array. Here is my benchmark code:
<?php
$array = array();
for($i=0; $i<100000; $i++) {
$array[] = mt_rand();
}
function recursiveCopy($array, $count) {
if($count === 1000)
return;
$foo = $array;
recursiveCopy($array, $count+1);
}
function recursiveReference($array, $count) {
if($count === 1000)
return;
$foo = &$array;
recursiveReference($array, $count+1);
}
$time = microtime(1);
recursiveCopy($array, 0);
$copyTime = (microtime(1) - $time);
echo "Took " . $copyTime . "s \n";
$time = microtime(1);
recursiveReference($array, 0);
$referenceTime = (microtime(1) - $time);
echo "Took " . $referenceTime . "s \n";
echo "Reference / Copy: " . ($referenceTime / $copyTime);
The actual result I got was, that recursiveReference took about 20 times (!) as long as recursiveCopy.
Can somebody explain this PHP behaviour?
PHP will very likely implement copy-on-write for its arrays, meaning when you "copy" an array, PHP doesn't do all the work of physically copying the memory until you modify one of the copies and your variables can no longer reference the same internal representation.
Your benchmarking is therefore fundamentally flawed, as your recursiveCopy function doesn't actually copy the object; if it did, you would run out of memory very quickly.
Try this: By assigning to an element of the array you force PHP to actually make a copy. You'll find you run out of memory pretty quickly as none of the copies go out of scope (and aren't garbage collected) until the recursive function reaches its maximum depth.
function recursiveCopy($array, $count) {
if($count === 1000)
return;
$foo = $array;
$foo[9492] = 3; // Force PHP to copy the array
recursiveCopy($array, $count+1);
}
in recursiveReference you're calling recursiveCopy... this doesn't make any sense, in this case you're calling recursiveReference just once. correct your code, rund the benchmark again and come back with your new results.
in addition, i don't think it's useful for a benchmark to do this recursively. a better solution would be to call a function 1000 times in a loop - once with the array directly and one with a reference to that array.
You don't need to (and thus shouldn't) assign or pass variables by reference just for performance reasons. PHP does such optimizations automatically.
The test you ran is flawed because of these automatic optimizations. In ran the following test instead:
<?php
for($i=0; $i<100000; $i++) {
$array[] = mt_rand();
}
$time = microtime(1);
for($i=0; $i<1000; $i++) {
$copy = $array;
unset($copy);
}
$duration = microtime(1) - $time;
echo "Normal Assignment and don't write: $duration<br />\n";
$time = microtime(1);
for($i=0; $i<1000; $i++) {
$copy =& $array;
unset($copy);
}
$duration = microtime(1) - $time;
echo "Assignment by Reference and don't write: $duration<br />\n";
$time = microtime(1);
for($i=0; $i<1000; $i++) {
$copy = $array;
$copy[0] = 0;
unset($copy);
}
$duration = microtime(1) - $time;
echo "Normal Assignment and write: $duration<br />\n";
$time = microtime(1);
for($i=0; $i<1000; $i++) {
$copy =& $array;
$copy[0] = 0;
unset($copy);
}
$duration = microtime(1) - $time;
echo "Assignment by Reference and write: $duration<br />\n";
?>
This was the output:
//Normal Assignment without write: 0.00023698806762695
//Assignment by Reference without write: 0.00023508071899414
//Normal Assignment with write: 21.302103042603
//Assignment by Reference with write: 0.00030708312988281
As you can see there is no significant performance difference in assigning by reference until you actually write to the copy, i.e. when there is also a functional difference.
Generally speaking in PHP, calling by reference is not something you'd do for performance reasons; it's something you'd do for functional reasons - ie because you actually want the referenced variable to be updated.
If you don't have a functional reason for calling by reference then you should stick with regular parameter passing, because PHP handles things perfectly efficiently that way.
(that said, as others have pointed out, your example code isn't exactly doing what you think it is anyway ;))
In recursiveReference() function you call recursiveCopy() function. It it what you really intended to do?
You do nothing with $foo variable - probably it was supposed to be used in further method call?
Passing variable by reference should generally save stack memory in case of passing large objects.
recursiveReference is calling recursiveCopy.
Not that that would necessarily harm performance, but that's probably not what you're trying to do.
Not sure why performance is slower, but it doesn't reflect the measurement you're trying to make.
(assume php5) consider
<?php
$foo = 'some words';
//case 1
print "these are $foo";
//case 2
print "these are {$foo}";
//case 3
print 'these are ' . $foo;
?>
Is there much of a difference between 1 and 2?
If not, what about between 1/2 and 3?
The performance difference has been irrelevant since at least January 2012, and likely earlier:
Single quotes: 0.061846971511841 seconds
Double quotes: 0.061599016189575 seconds
Earlier versions of PHP may have had a difference - I personally prefer single quotes to double quotes, so it was a convenient difference. The conclusion of the article makes an excellent point:
Never trust a statistic you didn’t forge yourself.
(Although the article quotes the phrase, the original quip was likely falsely attributed to Winston Churchill, invented by Joseph Goebbels' propaganda ministry to portray Churchill as a liar:
Ich traue keiner Statistik, die ich nicht selbst gefälscht habe.
This loosely translates to, "I do not trust a statistic that I did not fake myself.")
Well, as with all "What might be faster in real life" questions, you can't beat a real life test.
function timeFunc($function, $runs)
{
$times = array();
for ($i = 0; $i < $runs; $i++)
{
$time = microtime();
call_user_func($function);
$times[$i] = microtime() - $time;
}
return array_sum($times) / $runs;
}
function Method1()
{
$foo = 'some words';
for ($i = 0; $i < 10000; $i++)
$t = "these are $foo";
}
function Method2()
{
$foo = 'some words';
for ($i = 0; $i < 10000; $i++)
$t = "these are {$foo}";
}
function Method3()
{
$foo = 'some words';
for ($i = 0; $i < 10000; $i++)
$t = "these are " . $foo;
}
print timeFunc('Method1', 10) . "\n";
print timeFunc('Method2', 10) . "\n";
print timeFunc('Method3', 10) . "\n";
Give it a few runs to page everything in, then...
0.0035568
0.0035388
0.0025394
So, as expected, the interpolation are virtually identical (noise level differences, probably due to the extra characters the interpolation engine needs to handle). Straight up concatenation is about 66% of the speed, which is no great shock. The interpolation parser will look, find nothing to do, then finish with a simple internal string concat. Even if the concat were expensive, the interpolator will still have to do it, after all the work to parse out the variable and trim/copy up the original string.
Updates By Somnath:
I added Method4() to above real time logic.
function Method4()
{
$foo = 'some words';
for ($i = 0; $i < 10000; $i++)
$t = 'these are ' . $foo;
}
print timeFunc('Method4', 10) . "\n";
Results were:
0.0014739
0.0015574
0.0011955
0.001169
When you are just declaring a string only and no need to parse that string too, then why to confuse PHP debugger to parse. I hope you got my point.
Live benchmarks:
http://phpbench.com/
There is actually a subtle difference when concatenating variables with single vs double quotes.
#Adam's test used
"these are " . $foo
note that the following is even faster:
'these are ' . $foo;
this is due to the fact, that a double quoted "string" gets evaluated, where a single quoted 'string' is just taken as is...
Don't get too caught up on trying to optimize string operations in PHP. Concatenation vs. interpolation is meaningless (in real world performance) if your database queries are poorly written or you aren't using any kind of caching scheme. Write your string operations in such a way that debugging your code later will be easy, the performance differences are negligible.
#uberfuzzy Assuming this is just a question about language minutia, I suppose it's fine. I'm just trying to add to the conversation that comparing performance between single-quote, double-quote and heredoc in real world applications in meaningless when compared to the real performance sinks, such as poor database queries.
Any differences in execution time are completely negligible.
Please see
NikiC's Blog: Disproving the Single Quotes Performance Myth for a technical explanation how interpolation and concatenation works in PHP and why it is absolutely pointless to care about their speed.
Don't waste time on micro-optimizations like this. Use a profiler to measure the performance of your application in a real world scenario and then optimize where it is really needed. Optimising a single sloppy DB query is likely to make a bigger performance improvement than applying micro-optimisations all over your code.
there is a difference when concatenating variables... and what you are doing with the result... and if what you are doing is dumping it to output, is or isn't output buffering on.
also, what is the memory situation of the server? typically memory management on a higher level platform is worse than that at lower platforms...
$a = 'parse' . $this;
is managing memory at the user code platform level...
$a = "parse $this";
is managing memory at the php system code platform level...
so these benchmarks as related to CPU don't tell the full story.
running the benchmark 1000 times vs running the benchmark 1000 times on a server that is attempting to run that same simulation 1000 times concurrently... you might get drastically different results depending on the scope of the application.
I seem to remember that the developer of the forum software, Vanilla replaced all the double quotes in his code with single quotes and noticed a reasonable amount of performance increase.
I can't seem to track down a link to the discussion at the moment though.
Just to add something else to the mix, if you are using a variable inside a double quoted string syntax:
$foo = "hello {$bar}";
is faster than
$foo = "hello $bar";
and both of these are faster than
$foo = 'hello' . $bar;
Double quotes can be much slower. I read from several places that that it is better to do this
'parse me '.$i.' times'
than
"parse me $i times"
Although I'd say the second one gave you more readable code.
Practically there is no difference at all! See the timings: http://micro-optimization.com/single-vs-double-quotes
It should be noted that, when using a modified version of the example by Adam Wright with 3 variables, the results are reversed and the first two functions are actually faster, consistently. This is with PHP 7.1 on CLI:
function timeFunc($function, $runs)
{
$times = array();
for ($i = 0; $i < $runs; $i++)
{
$time = microtime();
call_user_func($function);
#$times[$i] = microtime() - $time;
}
return array_sum($times) / $runs;
}
function Method1()
{
$foo = 'some words';
$bar = 'other words';
$bas = 3;
for ($i = 0; $i < 10000; $i++)
$t = "these are $foo, $bar and $bas";
}
function Method2()
{
$foo = 'some words';
$bar = 'other words';
$bas = 3;
for ($i = 0; $i < 10000; $i++)
$t = "these are {$foo}, {$bar} and {$bas}";
}
function Method3()
{
$foo = 'some words';
$bar = 'other words';
$bas = 3;
for ($i = 0; $i < 10000; $i++)
$t = "these are " . $foo . ", " . $bar . " and " .$bas;
}
print timeFunc('Method1', 10) . "\n";
print timeFunc('Method2', 10) . "\n";
print timeFunc('Method3', 10) . "\n";
I've also tried with '3' instead of just the integer 3, but I get the same kind of results.
With $bas = 3:
0.0016254
0.0015719
0.0019806
With $bas = '3':
0.0016495
0.0015608
0.0022755
It should be noted that these results vary highly (I get variations of about 300%), but the averages seem relatively steady and almost (9 out of 10 cases) always show a faster execution for the 2 first methods, with Method 2 always being slightly faster than method 1.
In conclusion: what is true for 1 single operation (be it interpolation or concatenation) is not always true for combined operations.
Yes, originally this is about PHP5, however in few months arrive PHP8 and today the best option tested over my PHP 7.4.5 is use PHP - Nowdoc (tested over WIN 10 + Apache and CentOs 7 + Apache):
function Method6(){
$k1 = 'AAA';
for($i = 0; $i < 10000; $i ++)$t = <<<'EOF'
K1=
EOF
.$k1.
<<<'EOF'
K2=
EOF
.$k1;
}
here the method #5 (using Heredoc to concatenat):
function Method5(){
$k1 = 'AAA';
for($i = 0; $i < 10000; $i ++)$t = <<<EOF
K1= $k1
EOF
.<<<EOF
K2=$k1
EOF;
}
the methods 1 to 4 is in beginning of this post
In all my tests the "winner" is method #6 (Newdoc), no't very easy to read, but very fast in CPU and ever using the function function timeFunc($function) by #Adam Wright.
I have tested php 7.4 and php 5.4 with following test cases, It was little still confusing to me.
<?php
$start_time = microtime(true);
$result = "";
for ($i = 0; $i < 700000; $i++) {
$result .= "THE STRING APPENDED IS " . $i;
// AND $result .= 'THE STRING APPENDED IS ' . $i;
// AND $result .= "THE STRING APPENDED IS $i";
}
echo $result;
$end_time = microtime(true);
echo "<br><br>";
echo ($end_time - $start_time) . " Seconds";
PHP 7.4 Outputs
1. "THE STRING APPENDED IS " . $i = 0.16744208335876
2. 'THE STRING APPENDED IS ' . $i = 0.16724419593811
3. "THE STRING APPENDED IS $i" = 0.16815495491028
PHP 5.3 Outputs
1. "THE STRING APPENDED IS " . $i = 0.27664494514465
2. 'THE STRING APPENDED IS ' . $i = 0.27818703651428
3. "THE STRING APPENDED IS $i" = 0.28839707374573
I have tested so many times, In php 7.4 it seems to be all 3 test cases got same result many times but still concatenation have little bittle advantage in performance.
Based on #adam-wright answer, I wanted to know if speed difference happens without no concataining / no vars in a string.
== My questions...
is $array['key'] call or set faster than $array["key"] !?
is $var = "some text"; slower than $var = 'some text'; ?
== My tests with new vars every time to avoid use same memory address :
function getArrDblQuote() {
$start1 = microtime(true);
$array1 = array("key" => "value");
for ($i = 0; $i < 10000000; $i++)
$t1 = $array1["key"];
echo microtime(true) - $start1;
}
function getArrSplQuote() {
$start2 = microtime(true);
$array2 = array('key' => 'value');
for ($j = 0; $j < 10000000; $j++)
$t2 = $array2['key'];
echo microtime(true) - $start2;
}
function setArrDblQuote() {
$start3 = microtime(true);
for ($k = 0; $k < 10000000; $k++)
$array3 = array("key" => "value");
echo microtime(true) - $start3;
}
function setArrSplQuote() {
$start4 = microtime(true);
for ($l = 0; $l < 10000000; $l++)
$array4 = array('key' => 'value');
echo microtime(true) - $start4;
}
function setStrDblQuote() {
$start5 = microtime(true);
for ($m = 0; $m < 10000000; $m++)
$var1 = "value";
echo microtime(true) - $start5;
}
function setStrSplQuote() {
$start6 = microtime(true);
for ($n = 0; $n < 10000000; $n++)
$var2 = 'value';
echo microtime(true) - $start6;
}
print getArrDblQuote() . "\n<br>";
print getArrSplQuote() . "\n<br>";
print setArrDblQuote() . "\n<br>";
print setArrSplQuote() . "\n<br>";
print setStrDblQuote() . "\n<br>";
print setStrSplQuote() . "\n<br>";
== My Results :
array get double quote 2.1978828907013
array get single quote 2.0163490772247
array set double quote 1.9173440933228
array get single quote 1.4982950687408
var set double quote 1.485809803009
var set single quote 1.3026781082153
== My conclusion !
So, result is that difference is not very significant. However, on a big project, I think it can make the difference !