[development] performance foo

[Larry Garfield]

I seem to recall someone suggesting this before, and the problem was that the 
casting method didn't scale to nested objects and arrays.  It should be in 
the issue archive, somewhere. :-)

On Tuesday 13 December 2005 09:53 pm, 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.
>
>
> Here are the tested functions:
>
> function object2array($object) {
>    if (is_object($object)) {
>      foreach ($object as $key => $value) {
>        $array[$key] = $value;
>      }
>    }
>    else {
>      $array = $object;
>    }
>    return $array;
> }
>
> function better($object) {
>      if (is_object($object)) {
>          $array = (array) $object;
>      }
>      else {
>          $array = $object;
>      }
>      return $array;
> }
>
>
> Worth a patch?
>
>
> ..chrisxj

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Larry Garfield			AIM: LOLG42
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