Performance Comparison of Array Processing Methods in PHP

This project is a performance benchmark to compare two methods of processing and merging arrays in PHP. It generates test data and measures the execution time of each method to evaluate their efficiency.

Usage

Requirements

• PHP 7.4 or later is recommended due to the use of the spread operator (...) in methodTwo.

Running the Script

1. Save the script performance_test.php.

2. Execute the script using the PHP CLI:

   php performance_test.php
   

Our Results

The script was tested on PHP 8.2.25 with the following parameters:

• $data contains 10,000 sub-arrays.
• Each sub-array contains 100 values.

Performance Results

Method	Execution Time (seconds)	Relative Speed
Using array_merge inside the loop	60.691	1x (Baseline)
Using [] and a single array_merge with spread operator	0.027	2248x faster

Analysis

• array_merge in the loop:

  • Iteratively merging arrays inside the loop results in significant overhead due to repeated calls to array_merge.

• Spread operator with a single array_merge:

  • Collecting all sub-arrays first and performing a single array_merge using the spread operator is vastly more efficient.

These results clearly demonstrate that avoiding repeated calls to array_merge inside loops can lead to substantial performance gains, especially when processing large datasets.

Conclusion

When handling large datasets, leveraging the spread operator and minimizing the number of function calls can dramatically improve performance.