Re: date/strtotime poor performance - further digging (v 5.4.9) [PATCH]

I ended up digging deeper and created a patch for this, and have created a bug with the patch attached. https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=63699 Summary of changes: - Created a new tz_checked_valid flag on the global date structure - Created a callback method when date.timezone is modified by the ini (set) - Callback checks validity if set during runtime, and will error (with line number) accordingly. This is probably useful for some users that might no otherwise have realized they made a mistake on their ini_set() line in their code. - In guess_timezone(), if tz_checked_valid is not set, attempts to validate, errors if cannot. As previously noted from my benchmarks, over 1 million runs, it increased performance from: date : 1.751 sec strftime : 1.872 sec strtotime : 3.195 sec to: date : 1.238 sec strftime : 0.999 sec strtotime : 2.337 sec Here is a test case to show that it will not blow up on invalid timezones, and revalidates accordingly: <?php ini_set('date.timezone', 'FAKE_TIMEZONE'); echo date('F j, Y, g:i a'); ini_set('date.timezone', 'America/Chicago'); echo date('F j, Y, g:i a'); ?> Note: If the ini is actually set wrong, it will not error until they call a date function that makes use of the timezone, just like before. Thanks!