Atomized

PHP Objects: Still Pretty Damn Slow

Brandon Savage takes issue with my post benchmarking objects and arrays.

His argument is a straw man. My post is about a specific application – simple, flat data, where the primary concern is ease of syntax for accessing that data. He generalizes that position into one of OOP vs. non-OOP, which is not even remotely close to what I wrote.

So, let me be clear. OOP is, generally, good. His tips on writing OOP code are also generally good. In fact, I wrote a class to make dependency injection painless. Other paradigms, like functional programming, are also good.

This is not about that. This is about what’s faster for simple data storage: arrays or stdClass instances. The answer was, and still is, arrays.

I took the code from the previous post and re-ran it against PHP 5.3.0 on Snow Leopard. Everything else is is the same as in the other test. I added two new measures. One using $x = array('a' => 'a', 'b' => 'b'), and one with an object class with a constructor, like so:

class AnObject
{
    public $a;
    public $b;

    public function __construct($a, $b)
    {
        $this->a = $a;
        $this->b = $b;
    }
}

Here are the results:

As you can see, things are better than in PHP 5.2, but arrays are still faster in every case.

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