Increasing PHP performance

This is just a short post on a couple of performance increases you can do in your code that was kindly pointed out to me by WhiteAcid, when he looked through the source code of my captcha. I must admit I wasn't aware of these slight improvements and I'm sure this post will inform a few people of the potential performance gains. I've haven't done any benchmarking on the following examples so if anyone knows of a good PHP benchmarking site, please send it in and I shall include the link here.

Conditions

The triple equals sign increases performance because PHP performs a strict check on the two variables.

<pre lang="php"> &lt;?php if($variable1 === $variable2) { //code } ?&gt; </pre>

Concatenation

I usually concat a string with the following:-

<pre lang="php"> &lt;?php echo '<option>'.$variable.'</option>'; ?&gt; </pre>

But a better way is to use commas to output the string because PHP only has to output it instead of using concatenation.

<pre lang="php"> &lt;?php echo '<option>',$variable,'</option>'; ?&gt; </pre>

Benchmarks

I found this excellent site with some benchmark tests:- PHP benchmarks

Also this on string benchmarking:- String benchmarks

For vs while Loops

Yet another benchmark, this one is quite comprehensive:- Speed freaks

That's all for now, I might include some more examples at a later time.

Timing class by Richard Heyes

Timing class

Have you got any performance tips you'd like to share? Leave a comment and I shall get in touch and choose the best ones which will be added to this post.