Question

Hey there. Today I wrote a small benchmark script to compare performance of copying variables vs. creating references to them. I was expecting, that creating references to large arrays for example would be significantly slower than copying the whole array. Here is my benchmark code:

<?php
    $array = array();

    for($i=0; $i<100000; $i++) {
        $array[] = mt_rand();
    }

    function recursiveCopy($array, $count) {
        if($count === 1000)
            return;

        $foo = $array;
        recursiveCopy($array, $count+1);
    }

    function recursiveReference($array, $count) {
        if($count === 1000)
            return;

        $foo = &$array;
        recursiveReference($array, $count+1);
    }

    $time = microtime(1);
    recursiveCopy($array, 0);
    $copyTime = (microtime(1) - $time);
    echo "Took " . $copyTime . "s \n";


    $time = microtime(1);
    recursiveReference($array, 0);
    $referenceTime = (microtime(1) - $time);
    echo "Took " . $referenceTime . "s \n";

    echo "Reference / Copy: " . ($referenceTime / $copyTime);

The actual result I got was, that recursiveReference took about 20 times (!) as long as recursiveCopy.

Can somebody explain this PHP behaviour?

Answer 1

PHP will very likely implement copy-on-write for its arrays, meaning when you “copy” an array, PHP doesn’t do all the work of physically copying the memory until you modify one of the copies and your variables can no longer reference the same internal representation.

Your benchmarking is therefore fundamentally flawed, as your recursiveCopy function doesn’t actually copy the object; if it did, you would run out of memory very quickly.

Try this: By assigning to an element of the array you force PHP to actually make a copy. You’ll find you run out of memory pretty quickly as none of the copies go out of scope (and aren’t garbage collected) until the recursive function reaches its maximum depth.

function recursiveCopy($array, $count) {
    if($count === 1000)
        return;

    $foo = $array;
    $foo[9492] = 3; // Force PHP to copy the array
    recursiveCopy($array, $count+1);
}