Clancy wrote:
Also what the relative virtues of defining the same set of fields for every contact, as
against either defining only the fields which actually hold values, as in the following
examples?
a:
$contacts['clancy']['home_address'] = 'jkjkjk';
$contacts['clancy']['home_phone'] = 0123 4567;
$contacts['clancy'][' office_address''] = '';
$contacts['clancy']['office_phone'] = '';
$contacts['joe']['home_address'] = '';
$contacts['joe']['home_phone'] = '';
$contacts['joe']['office_address'] = 'jsfvkl';
$contacts['joe']['office_phone'] = 'jsfvkl';
b;
$contacts['clancy']['home_phone'] = 0123 4567;
$contacts['clancy']['home_address'] = 'jkjkjk';
$contacts['joe']['office_address'] = 'jsfvkl';
$contacts['joe']['office_phone'] = 'jsfvkl';
if you go for option b; you're going to have do a vast amount of isset()
checks in a for loop and all kinds of fancy business logic for
$contacts['clancy']['home_phone'] = 0123 4567;
vs
$contacts['clancy']['home_phone'] = '';
vs
'home_phone' not set
so one would guess that code would far outweigh any tiny speed gain from
dropping the additional items in the array.
on another note; php has been stable and speedy now for a very long
time, some bit's like the reflection api could be speeded up a little
bit as demand grows, but certainly all scalars and compound types have
been tested and optimized to hell and back (afaik).
you can test this all you're self, simply populate an array with say
1000 random other arrays of data with 10 keys each, stick it in a for
loop and time several times, then do the same for an array as above but
with subarrays of only 5 keys; see if you can spot any significant
difference. [then compare to say a single database select, or an
execution of a small script.]
another way of putting it; I'm 99% sure that nobodies code is perfectly
optimised enough by itself to notice any performance hits from php;
quite sure you could make far bigger gains by optimising you're own code
first :p
regards! <ramble>
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