Profiling on Daniel Doezema's Blog

PHP Output Profiling: Echo vs Concat

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I was in the middle of a code review a simple question came up: “What’s the fastest way to output a segmented string in PHP?”

echo '<div>';
echo '<span>';
echo 'This is a random number: ' . mt_rand(1,100);
echo '</span>';
echo '</div>';

– OR –

$html = '<div>';
$html .= '<span>';
$html .= 'This is a random number: ' . mt_rand(1,100);
$html .= '</span>';
$html .= '</div>';
echo $html;

My initial guess was that calling echo as little as possible during a request would end up performing better as there would be no need to interact with an output buffer or perform other logic tied to STDOUT.

Benchmarking and Timing PHP Class

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Introducing a simple, yet deceivingly useful, micro benchmarking / timer class called Bench.

I’ve found myself on more than a few occasion using this familiar block of code in order to quickly narrow down a bottleneck or test a specific section of code.

$start = microtime(true);
// [Some Code To Test]
$time = (microtime(true) - $start);
echo $time . ' Seconds';

This is a crude but effective way of finding out how long it takes to get from line A to line B. On the down-side, this technique is annoying to implement, only measures time between two points, and makes code look very cluttered – so I started developing Bench.