Boost Your PHP Performance: A General Overview of Faster Function Alternatives (Part 2/4)

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Photo by Agê Baros on Unsplash

In the first part of this series, we covered some of the native functions in PHP 8+, comparing their slower and faster alternatives. If you haven’t read it yet, check it out here:

Boost Your PHP Performance: A General Overview of Faster Function Alternatives (Part 1/4)

Now, we continue our deep dive into function performance by benchmarking more PHP functions. And trust me, this list is quite long, with many cases where a faster alternative exists.

Performance Comparisons

Below are function comparisons with an explanation of which is faster and why.

1. implode() vs. join() for Large Arrays

Comparison: implode() and join() are identical functions, where join() is just an alias for implode(). Therefore, there is no speed difference between them.

Example:

$array = ['Hello', 'world', '!'];
$string = implode(' ', $array);
echo $string; //…