Question

I’m going to have a file with about 5 MB size and I have 2 options:

1. Read a plain PHP array from a file using include function.
2. Read a serialize/json converted array from a file using file_get_contents function then decode it.

Which one will be faster? I’m going to use it as cache.

Answer 1

Reading a serialized array is much faster, even if you use a bytecode cache.