Question

That’s about all I need to ask. Checked the PHP manual and saw a user post saying that serialize is 45-90% slower than json_encode (he ran some benchmarks). But how “slow” is slow? I can find a lot of “versus” stuff sprawling around but none of which a beginner like me can relate to.

I just wrote a script that encoded an array in json and another one to decode it. I did same with serialize. Obviuously that won’t tell me any significant differences between them.

Answer 1

If you’re transferring data between one application and another, it’s usually almost always better to use JSON encoded data rather than PHP serialized data as the later is a format specific to PHP and not as portable as JSON.

Even in a situation where both the server and client are both PHP-based, it behooves you to use a portable format like JSON to allow the creation of new clients in the future without having to change response format from the server.

I haven’t done any benchmarking of these two myself, but if you’re finding that json encoding is faster than serialization, than all the more reason to use it.

Also, I prefer JSON encoded data as it is easier to read than serialized data and can quickly be thrown into firebug to be visualized.