RE: [PHP-DEV] Performance of buffer based functionality (JSON, AES, serialize())

On Thu Nov 25 12:47 PM, Andi Gutmans wrote: > > I know there have been some high-end apps that have benefited from > some custom serializers, etc... (typically platform dependent). > I wonder if people here think improvements in these areas would move > the needle for the majority of mainstream apps or not. > Like people have mentioned, improving (un)serialize speed would be a huge benefit, especially for caching data sets or large objects. From experience, it would seem valuable to have: 1) serialize_text($var) The existing serialize() minus the NULL bytes on private properties. It has been a source problems for developers serializing an object with private properties and storing it in a database (the string may get cutoff). I'm not sure why there's a NULL byte in 'zend_mangle_property_name', instead the char "_" could be used to mark a private property in the serialized text. The unserialize could be BC compatible accepting both NULL and "_" around a private property. 2) serialize_binary($var) An efficient and compact serialization using techniques from igbinary. A potential problem with igbinary I've noticed is it packs a double as a 64 bit integer. That could be a problem if you serialize on a platform that has an IEEE 754 binary representation and unserialize on a non-IEEE platform but I don't know if php compiles on architectures that are non-IEEE. It could also be interesting to pack integers as varints: http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/encoding.html#varints http://protobuf-c.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/google/protobuf-c/protobuf-c. c That's most likely slower though then what igbinary does with integers