Question

For me it’s more comfortable to write

<?php

$a = true;

if(true) {

    $a = false;

}

?>

Would next code executes faster:

<?php
$a = true;
if(true) {
    $a = false;
}
?>

UPD

Even if whitespace characters are ignored by PHP, while parsing .php file PHP should think (“should I ignore this character or not”) every time it encounters whitespace. Would it increase execution time or not?

Answer 1

Extra whitespace will have next to no effect on performance, other than technically there are more characters to crawl over at parse time. We’re talking about fractions of fractions of a second here, because the whitespace is simply ignored as it’s parsed.

Also with OPCODE caching like APC, subsequent requests for the same file will not incur re-parsing of the same file (generally speaking).