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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T05:37:45+00:00

I have a PHP script that builds a binary search tree over a rather

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I have a PHP script that builds a binary search tree over a rather large CSV file (5MB+). This is nice and all, but it takes about 3 seconds to read/parse/index the file.

Now I thought I could use serialize() and unserialize() to quicken the process. When the CSV file has not changed in the meantime, there is no point in parsing it again.

To my horror I find that calling serialize() on my index object takes 5 seconds and produces a huge (19MB) text file, whereas unserialize() takes unbearable 27 seconds to read it back. Improvements look a bit different. 😉

So – is there a faster mechanism to store/restore large object graphs to/from disk in PHP?

(To clarify: I’m looking for something that takes significantly less than the aforementioned 3 seconds to do the de-serialization job.)

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It seems that the answer to your question is no.

    Even if you discover a “binary serialization format” option most likely even that would be to slow for what you envisage.

    So, what you may have to look into using (as others have mentioned) is a database, memcached, or on online web service.

    I’d like to add the following ideas as well:

    • caching of requests/responses
    • your PHP script does not shutdown but becomes a network server to answer queries
    • or, dare I say it, change the data structure and method of query you are currently using
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