Question

I made a PHP app which was taking about ~0.0070sec for execution. Now, I added a hashtable array with about 2000 values. Suddenly the time for execution has gone up to ~0.0700 secs. Almost 10 times the previous value.

I tried commenting out the part where I was searching inside the hashtable array (but array was still left defined). Still, the execution time remains about ~0.0500secs.

Array is something like:

$subjectinfo = array(
        'TPT753' => 'Industrial Training',
        'TPT801' => 'High Polymeric Engineering',
        'TPT802' => 'Corrosion Engineering',
        'TPT803' => 'Decorative ,Industrial And High Performance Coatings',
        'TPT851' => 'Project');

Is there any way to optimize this part?

I cannot use Database as I am running this app on Google app engine which is still not supporting JDO database for php.

Some more code from the app:

function getsubjectinfo($name)
    {
        $subjectinfo = array(
        'TPT753' => 'Industrial Training',
        'TPT801' => 'High Polymeric Engineering',
        'TPT802' => 'Corrosion Engineering',
        'TPT803' => 'Decorative ,Industrial And High Performance Coatings',
        'TPT851' => 'Project');

    $name = str_replace("-", "", $name);
    $name = str_replace(" ", "", $name);
    if (isset($subjectinfo["$name"]))
        return "(".$subjectinfo["$name"].")";
    else
        return "";
   }

Then I am using the following statement 2-3 times in the app:

echo $key." ".$this->getsubjectinfo($key)

Answer 1

function getsubjectinfo($name)
{
    $subjectinfo = array(
    'TPT753' => 'Industrial Training',
    'TPT801' => 'High Polymeric Engineering',
    'TPT802' => 'Corrosion Engineering',
    'TPT803' => 'Decorative ,Industrial And High Performance Coatings',
    'TPT851' => 'Project');
// ..
}

This way the array is created everytime you call the function. Consider using a static variable here

function getsubjectinfo($name)
{
    static $subjectinfo = array(
    'TPT753' => 'Industrial Training',
    'TPT801' => 'High Polymeric Engineering',
    'TPT802' => 'Corrosion Engineering',
    'TPT803' => 'Decorative ,Industrial And High Performance Coatings',
    'TPT851' => 'Project');
// ..
}

And as a sidenote: You can also use a SQLite-Database 🙂

Update: An OOP approach

class MyClass {
    public static $subjectnames = array(
      'TPT753' => 'Industrial Training',
      'TPT801' => 'High Polymeric Engineering',
      'TPT802' => 'Corrosion Engineering',
      'TPT803' => 'Decorative ,Industrial And High Performance Coatings',
      'TPT851' => 'Project');

    public function getsubjectinfo($name) {
        $name = str_replace("-", "", $name);
        $name = str_replace(" ", "", $name);
        if (isset(self::$subjectnames["$name"]))
            return "(".self::$subjectnames["$name"].")";
        else
            return "";
    }
}