Question

I am curious, is there any performance gain, like using less memory or resources in PHP for:

50 different setting variables saved into array like this

$config['facebook_api_secret'] = 'value here';

Or 50 different setting variables saved into a Constant like this

define('facebook_api_secret', 'value here');

Answer 1

I think this is in the realm of being a micro-optimization. That is, the difference is small enough that it isn’t worth using one solution over the other for the sake of performance. If performance were that critical to your app, you wouldn’t be using PHP! 🙂

Use whatever is more convenient or that makes more sense. I put config data into constants if only because they shouldn’t be allowed to change after the config file is loaded, and that’s what constants are for.