Re: [development] performance foo

14 Dec 2005

      Chris Johnson wrote:
...
Just came across something that triggered a bit of performance testing.  
One can cast objects to arrays and vice-versa in PHP.
So, in common.inc, we have a function called object2array() that loops 
through  an object and makes it into an array.  Is that faster than the 
equivalent function using a cast (array) operator?  No.  In fact, it's 
about 2.4 times slower.  However, both are very fast for an object with 
26 elements.  Here's the benchmark:
10000 'object2array' calls took 3.04 seconds.
The average was 0.00030442 seconds per call.
10000 'better' calls took 1.27 seconds.
The average was 0.00012693 seconds per call.
Test out 10k calls to get_object_vars().

I've been running Drupal for a few months with a version of 
object2array() to see if the array handling is ever used:

function object2array($object) {
   if (is_object($object)) {
     foreach ($object as $key => $value) {
       $array[$key] = $value;
     }
   }
   else {
     trigger_error('Watch yer type!!');
     $array = $object;
   }

   return $array;
}

I haven't run into object2array being called with anything that isn't an 
object yet.

-- 
Neil Drumm
http://delocalizedham.com/