PHP and the million array baby

Question

Imagine you have the following array of integers:

array(1, 2, 1, 0, 0, 1, 2, 4, 3, 2, [...] );

The integers go on up to one million entries; on

Answer 1

As Mark said, this is why databases was created - to allow you to search (and manipulate, but you might not need that) data effectively based on your regular usage patterns. It'll also might also be faster than implementing your own search using the array. I'm guessing we're talking about somewhere close to 2-300MB of data (before serialization) being serialized and unserialized each time you're accessing the array.

If you want to speed it up, try to assign each element of the array separately - you might trade function call overhead for time spent in serialization. You could also extend this with your own extension, wrapping your dataset in a small retrieval interface.

I'm guessing the reason why you can't directly store the zvals are because they contain internal state, and you simply can't just point the variable symbol table to the previous table.