all, as ive been researching SPL lately ive read several times that spl will store only the current element of the underlying collection in memory during iteration. articles that mention this will say that using these iterators should afford savings when traversing large collections. well having found nothing empirical i decided to run some tests myself. and for the hell of it, i also decided to throw the array-by-reference construct in there (thats the name im giving to the syntax which lets you alter the array youre iterating over from within the array). mainly because ive heard people say it will save memory. however, based upon some things ive read, ive been skeptical of that info. so here is a quick little report i whipped up, which has the script i used for the test, and the results in a graphical format so you can get a quick feel for them. http://nathan.moxune.com/arrayVsArrayIteratorReport.php at this point i must retract some of the statements i made during the conversation about ruby yesterday. it turns out, spl iteration is not twice as fast as standard array iteration, in fact it quite a bit slower! also, it takes up more memory, and lastly, whoever said that using the array-by-reference syntax saves memory is dead wrong ;) -nathan
