note 36105 rejected from language.references.pass by pollita
| From: | pollita@php.net | Date: | Thu, 25 Sep 2003 23:12:15 +0000 |
| Subject: | note 36105 rejected from language.references.pass by pollita | ||
| References: | 1 | Groups: | php.notes |
| Request: | Send a blank email to php-notes+get-57144@lists.php.net to get a copy of this message | ||
Note Submitter:
----
I wrote a short program to compare the speed of pass by reference with big strings vs pass by value:
The code was as follows:
<?php
function m_time ()
{
list ($mt_micros,$mt_seconds) = explode (' ',microtime ());
return ((float) $mt_seconds + (float) $mt_micros);
}
function stopwatch ($sw_code)
{
$sw_start = m_time ();
eval ($sw_code);
$sw_end = m_time ();
return ($sw_end - $sw_start);
}
function filetostring ($fs_filename,$fs_readmode = 'rb')
{
if ((file_exists ($fs_filename)) && (is_file ($fs_filename)) && (is_readable
($fs_filename)) && ($fs_handle = fopen ($fs_filename,$fs_readmode)) && (flock
($fs_handle,LOCK_SH)))
$fs_buffer = fread ($fs_handle,filesize ($fs_filename));
else
$fs_buffer = NULL;
if ($fs_handle != NULL)
{
flock ($fs_handle,LOCK_UN);
fclose ($fs_handle);
}
return ($fs_buffer);
}
function reftext (&$ref)
{
echo ($ref);
}
function valtext ($val)
{
echo ($val);
}
function testref ()
{
global $text;
for ($x = 0; $x < 50; $x++)
{
reftext ($text);
}
}
function testval ()
{
global $text;
for ($x = 0; $x < 50; $x++)
{
valtext ($text);
}
}
$text = filetostring ('path/to/a/big/text/file');
ob_start ();
$time1 = stopwatch ('testref ();');
ob_end_clean ();
ob_start ();
$time2 = stopwatch ('testval ();');
ob_end_clean ();
echo ('<br>Pass by reference processing time: '.$time1.'<br>');
echo ('Pass by value processing time: '.$time2.'<br>');
?>
I gave it a text file of about 100K to work with and ran it a few times. There was no significant
difference in speed between the pass by reference version of the function and the pass by value
version. I increased the number of iterations in the loop to 100 and found under those
circumstances pass by reference was slightly faster (1.2 seconds vs 1.5 seconds)
From this the conclusion is that, as far as simple data types such as strings or arrays go, pass by
reference is really only worth it if you're handling massive amounts of data. Under most
circumstances, passing by value should be fine.