Re: functions versus includes

Nathan Nobbe wrote:

On Nov 11, 2007 9:32 PM, Robert Cummings <robert@interjinn.com <mailto:robert@interjinn.com>> wrote:

    On Mon, 2007-11-12 at 11:27 +1100, Chris wrote:

Frank Lopes wrote:

I just started using PHP and got to think... Without getting into the discussion of "best practices",

    strictly from

a performance perspective, what is faster: a function or an include? For example I have a block of text that needs to appear

    mutliple times

throughout the site. Will I be better off creating a function with its contents and then later just calling the function or, will it be faster (from an execution perspective) for me to

    create an

.inc file that gets included later on? Micro-optimization is pretty useless. I seriously doubt you would

    notice

any difference in performance. This comes under the other discussions like about which is faster

    - a

foreach/while/for loop. You'll find other bottlenecks (eg changing a regex to do an

    str_replace)

which will make a bigger difference.

    Actually, if you're going to use a comparison between using regex and
    string replacement as an example of lower hanging optimization fruit, I
    think you'll find the difference between invoking a function and
    including a file to be on par. The function is by far the better
    solution when considering speed.

rob is right. i said screw it and wrote out a series of test scripts; just got curious. so, there is one file which includes an external script that operates on a variable in global scope; then there is a script which defines a function internally; then there is a script which includes another script with that function defined in it. the last one won each time; quite to my surprise. nathan@devel ~/working/www/phpExperiments/functionVsInclude $ php mainWInclude.php 10 totalTime: 0.001057 nathan@devel ~/working/www/phpExperiments/functionVsInclude $ php mainWFunction.php 10 totalTime: 0.000642 nathan@devel ~/working/www/phpExperiments/functionVsInclude $ php mainWExternalFunction.php 10 totalTime: 0.000604 As I said, it's a micro-optimization *shrug*. 0.0004 seconds difference over 10 iterations - wow ;) -- Postgresql & php tutorials http://www.designmagick.com/