Speeding Up Array Handling

Arrays are a vital part of any PHP program. Indeed, dealing with arrays is unavoidable as much of the real-world data our program handles day-to-day arrives in the form of an array. One example is data from an HTML form posting. The data ends up in either $_GET or $_POST as an array.

In this section, we’ll introduce a little-known class included with the SPL: the SplFixedArray class. Migrating our data from a standard array over to a SplFixedArray instance will not only improve performance but requires significantly less memory as well. Learning how to take advantage of the techniques that can have a substantial impact on the speed and efficiency of any program code currently using arrays with a massive amount of data. ...