Are you confused by the title? I was when I first got the idea to even write this blog as well. I was recently perusing the CakePHP change logs and came across an interesting commit – Optimization for Hash Method.
The optimization is quite simple, this code:
while (($key = array_shift($parts)) !== null)
Is replaced with the following code:
foreach ($parts as $key)
This is actually done several times in the commit. It seems that the original developer is really keen on using the array_shift function. Just in seeing this code, I thought the original code was odd to utilize that function so I immediately had to do a comparison and validate the optimization!
The second file needs to then use a foreach loop:
Now that the basics are done, it's time to pull out the recent A Simple But Effective Speed Comparison tool that I built earlier and running the comparison between the two files.
The results are a bit surprising, the while loop code executed about 6,000 times in 10 seconds. Whereas the foreach loop code executed about 8,000 times in 10 seconds. This equates to about a 25% improvement while looping through an array of 100 records.
I actually thought that using array_shift and assigning the results to a value, then checking that it is not null would be much slower compared to a foreach loop than just 25%. It seems like it would have been much slower and in reality if the array was smaller it would be even more negligible of a difference.
At the end of the day, I think the foreach loop is more readable and would continue to use that regardless of the 25% speed increase… Published on Sep 12, 2012 Tags: Optimization
| foreach
| while
| PHP
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Jamie Munro is the author of ASP.NET MVC 5 with Bootstrap and Knockout.js,
Knockout.js: Building Dynamic Client-Side Web Applications,
20 Recipes for Programming MVC 3,
and 20 Recipes for Programming PhoneGap. He has been developing websites and web applications for over 20 years. Jamie began his writing career in 2009. As the success of Jamie's blog grew, he turned his writing passion to books about web development in hopes that his many years of experience could be passed on to his readers. No matter the programming language you're looking to learn, I've hopefully compiled an incredible set of tutorials for you to learn; whether you are beginner
or an expert, there is something for everyone to learn. Each topic I go in-depth and provide many examples throughout. I can't wait for you to dig in
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To start we need two basic files. The first file will test using a while loop:
<?php
$start = microtime();
$array = array_fill(0, 100, 'dummy_data');
while ($key = array_shift($array) !== null) {
echo $key;
}
$end = microtime();
?>
<hr/>
Execution Time: <?php echo ($end - $start) ;?> seconds.
<?php
$start = microtime();
$array = array_fill(0, 100, 'dummy_data');
foreach ($array as $key) {
echo $key;
}
$end = microtime();
?>
<hr/>
Execution Time: <?php echo ($end - $start) ;?> seconds.
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