Question

I have a very big array stored in memory after reading a whole file in an array (as hex) like this :

$bin_content = fread(fopen($filename,"r"),filesize($filename));
$hex_decode = explode(" ",chunk_split(bin2hex($bin_content),2," "));
unset($bin_content);

function myfunction($i) {
  global $hex_decode;
  // stuff here 
}

When I create a function that uses this $hex_decode array as global … the script runs like forever (very slow) but if i call that function passing the $hex_decode as a parameter ( myfunction($i,$hex_decode) instead of myfunction($i) in which $i is a pointer) , things are more faster .

Can anyone explain why ? And is there any way to speed the script by reading that file in a different method .

I need to have the whole file in that array rather that line by line , because I’m building a custom ASN.1 decoder and i need to have it all .

Answer 1

There already was a similar question at StackOverflow, please take a look at:

The advantage / disadvantage between global variables and function parameters in PHP?