Question

A very minor saving either way but it prompted a mini-debate in the office and I wanted to get other feedback on it.

Assuming integer values for $x which is more efficient;

($x >= 3) 

or

($x > 2)

edit

I have rolled back a wording change because one of the factors we discussed is that some believed >= to be easier to immediately read and felt that for int values > 2 was pointless because you meant >= 3. This does not make the script faster but potentially more efficient in terms of maintaining it. (in before people explain how tiny a point this is)

Answer 1

On my test machine (PHP 5.3.3) I ran 5 runs of 10 million iterations of each and averaged the results. “$x > 2” took 5.7357 seconds while “$x >= 3” took 5.8654. Note this excludes compilation time because compilation occurred only once for these iterations. So “$x > 2” is faster, but barely. I don’t understand why, but there you go.