Benchmark: PHP strlen vs. count (and sizeof)

Sunday, March 25^th, 2012. 0 comments

I was writing some code that generated a string from an array and came across a pretty rare situation where I could either get the length of that array or the length of the assembled string. Wondering which was faster and finding nothing on Google, I put this benchmark together.

For the sake of search engines, I included sizeof() in the title. There was no need to include it in the benchmark as it’s the same as count() and runs at the same speed.

Function	Time	Comparison
`strlen()`	0.237 seconds	(8.85% faster)
`count()`	0.260 seconds

Here is the code:

<?php
 
$test_array = array(0,1,2,3,4,5);
$test_string = '/test/';
 
function getmicrotime()
{
	list($usec, $sec) = explode(' ',microtime());
	return ((float)$usec + (float)$sec);
}
 
$time_start = getmicrotime();
for ($i=0; $i<1000000; $i++)
{
	count($test_array);
}
echo 'count() :: '.number_format(getmicrotime()-$time_start,3).' seconds<br/>';
 
$time_start = getmicrotime();
for ($i=0; $i<1000000; $i++)
{
	strlen($test_string);
}
echo 'strlen() :: '.number_format(getmicrotime()-$time_start,3).' seconds<br/>';
 
?>

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