Benchmarking PHP code

Josh Sherman
3 min read
Software Development PHP

Have you ever asked yourself, “I wonder which of these blocks of code will run faster?” I know I have and I use a very basic template for setting up these benchmarking experiments. The gist of the script is to run through each block of code n times tracking the amount of time and memory it took to run. It’s not nearly as complete as it could be, but it serves as a good enough starting point for doing some quick tests.

<?php

$n = 1000000;

$start_time = microtime(true);
$start_mem  = memory_get_usage(true);

for ($i = 0; $i < $n; $i++)
{

}

$time = microtime(true) - $start_time;
$mem  = memory_get_usage(true) - $start_mem;

echo "Test 1\t{$time}\t{$mem}\n";

You can duplicate the test block as many times as you need it. Here’s a working benchmark I wrote to see if PHP’s built-in array_keys function was actually faster than doing a foreach:

<?php

$n = 1000000;

$array = [
    'one'   => 'This is the first',
    'two'   => 'This is the second',
    'three' => 'This is the third',
    'four'  => 'This is the fourth',
    'five'  => 'This is the fifth',
];

$start_time = microtime(true);
$start_mem  = memory_get_usage(true);

for ($i = 0; $i < $n; $i++)
{
    unset($array_keys);
    $array_keys = array_keys($array);
}

$time = microtime(true) - $start_time;
$mem  = memory_get_usage(true) - $start_mem;

echo "array_keys()\t{$time}\t{$mem}\n";

$start_time = microtime(true);
$start_mem  = memory_get_usage(true);

for ($i = 0; $i < $n; $i++)
{
    unset($array_keys);

    foreach ($array as $key => $value)
    {
        $array_keys[] = $key;
    }
}

$time = microtime(true) - $start_time;
$mem  = memory_get_usage(true) - $start_mem;

echo "foreach()\t{$time}\t{$mem}\n";

One improvement would be to track the average time per iteration as well as the fastest and slowest iteration. I went ahead and threw the code in a GitHub gist in case anyone wants to fork and improve upon it.

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About Josh

Husband. Father. Pug dad. Musician. Founder of Holiday API, Head of Engineering and Emoji Specialist at Mailshake, and author of the best damn Lorem Ipsum Library for PHP.

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