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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T15:50:29+00:00

I am working on website and I am trying to make it fast as

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I am working on website and I am trying to make it fast as much as possible – especially the small things that can make my site a little bit quicker.

So, my to my question – I got loop that run 5 times and in each time it echo something, If I’ll make variable and the loop will add the text I want to echo into the variable and just in the end I’ll echo the variable – will it be faster?

loop 1 (with the echo inside the loop)

for ($i = 0;$i < 5;$i++)
{
    echo "test";
}

loop 2 (with the echo outside [when the loop finish])

$echostr = "";
for ($i = 0;$i < 5;$i++)
{
    $echostr .= "test";
}
echo $echostr;

I know that loop 2 will increase a bit the file size and therfore the user will have to download more bytes but If I got huge loop will it be better to use second loop or not?

Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The difference is negligible. Do whatever is more readable (which in this case is definitely the first case). The first approach is not a “naive” approach so there will be no major performance difference (it may actually be faster, I’m not sure). The first approach will also use less memory. Also, in many languages (not sure about PHP), appending to strings is expensive, and therefore so is concatenation (because you have to seek to the end of the string, reallocate memory, etc.).

    Moreover, file size does not matter because PHP is entirely server-side — the user never has to download your script (in fact, it would be scary if they did/could). These types of things may matter in Javascript but not in PHP.

    Long story short — don’t write code constantly trying to make micro-optimizations like this. Write the code in the style that is most readable and idiomatic, test to see if performance is good, and if performance is bad then profile and rewrite the sections that perform poorly.

    I’ll end on a quote:

    “premature emphasis on efficiency is a big mistake which may well be the source of most programming complexity and grief.”
    – Donald Knuth

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