faster-php ⚡

Different approaches to improve PHP script performance. For discussion or additional methods create an issue or comment on the corresponding DEV article.

Get started

To test the methods yourself, first make sure PHP 7.4 is installed:

$ php -v
PHP 7.4.4 (cli) (built: Mar 20 2020 13:47:17) ...

Then clone this repo and install dependencies using Composer:

git clone https://github.com/devmount/faster-php
cd faster-php
composer install

Now you are ready to call the one of the test scripts presented below.

List of methods

1. Removing duplicates in array

Method:

// using
array_keys(array_flip($array));
// instead of
array_unique($array);

Test:

php test_array_unique.php

Result:

method	execution time
array_unique	787.31 ms
array_keys array_flip	434.03 ms

The alternative approach is 1.8x (44.87%) faster in this measurement. On average, it was ~1.5x (30%) faster. Tested on an array with 4166667 numeric elements having 3333333 unique entries.

Note: This is only applicable for simple, one-dimensional arrays since array_flip replaces keys by values.

2. Get random array element

Method:

// using
$array[mt_rand(0, count($array) - 1)];
// instead of
array_rand($array);

Test:

php test_array_rand.php

Result:

method	execution time
array_rand	25.99 μs
mt_rand	0.95 μs

The alternative approach is 27.3x (96.33%) faster in this measurement. On average, it was ~8x (87%) faster. Tested on an array with 5000000 random numeric elements.

3. Test for alphanumeric characters

Method:

// using
ctype_alnum($string);
// instead of
preg_match('/[a-zA-Z0-9]+/', $string);

Test:

php test_preg_match.php

Result:

method	execution time
preg_match	15.39 ms
ctype_alnum	2.06 ms

The alternative approach is 7.5x (86.59%) faster in this measurement. On average, it was ~4x (76%) faster. Tested on an array of alphanumeric and non-alphanumeric strings with 104448 elements.

The same applies to ctype_alpha() (check for alphabetic characters) and ctype_digit() (check for numeric characters)

4. Replace substrings

Method:

// using
strtr($string, 'a', 'b');
// instead of
str_replace('a', 'b', $string);

Test:

php test_string_replace.php

Result:

method	execution time
str_replace	676.59 ms
strtr	305.59 ms

The alternative approach is 2.2x (54.83%) faster in this measurement. On average, it was ~2x (51%) faster. Tested on an array of random strings with 5000000 elements.

Additional performance improvements

Here are some additional points I integrated into my coding convention that I found to improve perfomance slightly (if applicable):

• Prefer JSON over XML
• Declare variables before, not in every iteration of the loop
• Avoid function calls in the loop header (in for ($i=0; $i<count($array); $i) the count() method gets called in every iteration)
• Unset memory consuming variables
• Prefer select statement over multiple if statements
• Prefer require/include over require_once/include_once (ensure proper opcode caching)

Sources

• https://gist.github.com/bsalim/4442047
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4195937/what-are-some-good-php-performance-tips