Efficiency of PHP arrays cast as objects?

Question

From what I understand, PHP stdClass objects are generally faster than arrays, when the code is deeply-nested enough for it to actually matter. How is that eff

Answer 1

function benchmark($func_name, $iterations) {
    $begin = microtime(true);
    for ($i = 0; $i < $iterations; $i++) {
        $func_name();
    }
    $end = microtime(true);

    $execution_time = $end - $begin;

    echo $func_name , ': ' , $execution_time;
}

function standClass() {
    $obj = new stdClass();
    $obj->param_one = 1;
    $obj->param_two = 2;
}

function castFromArray() {
    $obj = (object)array('param_one' => 1, 'param_two' => 2);
}


benchmark('standClass', 1000);
benchmark('castFromArray', 1000);

benchmark('standClass', 100000);
benchmark('castFromArray', 100000);

Outputs:

standClass: 0.0045979022979736
castFromArray: 0.0053138732910156

standClass: 0.27266097068787
castFromArray: 0.20209217071533

Casting from an array to stdClass on the fly is around 30% more efficient, but the difference is still negligible until you know you will be performing the operation 100,000 times (and even then, you're only looking at a tenth of a second, at least on my machine).

So, in short, it doesn't really matter the vast majority of the time, but if it does, define the array in a single command and then type-cast it to an object. I definitely wouldn't spend time worrying about it unless you've identified the code in question as a bottleneck (and even then, focus on reducing your number of iterations if possible).