I've known this was the case for a while, but I read a blog post recently [sorry no link, forgot where] that gave some actual figures on the speed differences.

For those that dont know single quotes are much faster than double quotes in

PHP

 
This is simply because

PHP

  has to iterate through every character looking for escape characters and variables within a double quote string.  Single quote strings are just treated as plain text.

According to the test this guy did single quotes are about 6 times faster than double quotes.  Which in a large site, where your getting a lot of traffic it could seriously help shave off load times and keep the next big upgrade away!

I'm a huge fan of optimizing sites not buying bigger servers

Exactly MM - single quotes represent static strings, while double represent strings that are to be evaluated. I never use doubles except when I want to evaluate something like you would a sprintf.

Interestingly, the boys that wrote the SMF code do this a lot:

echo 'this is ', $aVar, ' yet another way ', print_r($someArr, true), $anObj->aFunc(), ' to achieve the same ', ' but I think it's faster';

Note the combination of things that you want echod back out - it's tiring to look at huge echo statements like this in the code, but from a speed perspective makes sense.

I dunno, interesting technique. I use it occassionally.

aye, using the . concatonation technique is faster than using sprintf to place variables in strings, about 5 times as fast for this particular test, makes sense i suppose

This is one of those things I never paid any attention to and it could give me considerably better performance in some scripts... thanks MM. 
/me goes to rewrite some stuff

Joining an array of strings.
This is for

python

 , but the same technique for

PHP

  should be used.
(Any language for that matter and i think i mention it before).

you have an array
A=["aaaa","bbbb","cccc","dddd"]
you want to join all pieces together
go
"".join(A)
and you end up with
"aaaabbbbccccdddd"
you can use variants of that, lets say u have template system etc
with very long arrays improvement is astronomical.

It is indeed - however if you look at my post, in that example it's echo this comma that comma another, not concatenated - the echo directive allows you to echo multiple items *without* concatenation, which is faster still.

@nop: in

PHP

  it is $newString = implode($delimiter, $array) and you're right, works brilliantly

nice one perk, thats why i love this forum

Edit: Just started using commas instead of periods. Yay for new knowledge etc

Oh and im <>guessing that the reason its faster is as follows [purely speculation though - perk?]
When you concatenate

PHP

  has to store the current string in memory, and then finally echo it out.

So if you did this:
echo 'blah' . $var . 'blah';

PHP

  would have to do this:
store 'blah';
store 'blah<contents of var>'
store 'blah<contents of var>blah'
then echo it out

with the comma your merely telling

php

  to whack the next bit out to the output buffer straight away

maybe im wrong tho, perk? show me the light u george bush lover

Sorry MM, I just saw this post... I don't know why it didn't show up in my All Unread before. Hmmm... makes me concerned a bit...

Anyhoo, you are correct: if I concatenate may strings, then

PHP

  needs to do a lot of mallocs and frees to build the final string... if you do this:

echo 'this', 'that', 'yet', 'another'

then the strings are absolutely static, there's no concatenation or mallocing going on... it's as fast and clean as can be. A simple thing, but effective and important.

Sorry again man!
/p

so comma vs period.

echo 'hi' , 'my ','name ','is: ',$name;
$a = 'hi' , 'my ','name ','is: ',$name;

both of those would work right? or does the comma only work for straight to echo?

echo yes, var assignment no - under the hood, echo is really a function, even though it has no parens. Comma-d variable assignment would not make sense IMO...

hermm, interesting about the comas versus periods. i switched a couple of months ago from using

echo "hello there $name";

to

echo 'hello there '.$name;

i am all for optimizing as you write, whether or not you think speed or performance is an issue at that juncture. so now i will be switching to

echo 'hello there ', $name;

thanks for the tip! 

Perfect evolution TJ -

Of course, the "$string" method has it's place, as does concatenation, the echo item,item,item method is probably the fastest of all and a great way to do it... albeit probably the least readable a year later LOL... and the SMF boys do that technique NO favors in the way that they use it throughout their code. Horrible to look at, simply horrible.

Recommendation:
If you're going to do this a lot, use a programmatic style that is REALLY readable a long time from now. My personal favorite is like this:



because looking at "single notions" on a single line is easier for me later, and the CRLF doesn't dick with compiler time at all.

Here, for example, is a line from a typical smf index.

php

  file: (This is a SINGLE ECHO STATEMENT)

echo '
<div id="footerarea" style="text-align: center; padding-bottom: 1ex;', $context['browser']['needs_size_fix'] && !$context['browser']['is_ie6'] ? ' width: 100%;' : '', '">
<script language="

JavaScript

 " type="text/

javascript

 "><!-- // --><![CDATA[
function smfFooterHighlight(element, value)
{
element.src = smf_images_url + "/" + (value ? "h_" : "" + element.id + ".gif";
}
// ]]></script>
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3" border="0" align="center" width="100%">
<tr>
<td width="28%" valign="middle" align="', !$context['right_to_left'] ? 'right' : 'left', '">
<a href="http://www.mysql.com/" target="_blank"><img id="powered-mysql" src="', $settings['images_url'], '/powered-mysql.gif" alt="', $txt['powered_by_mysql'], '" width="54" height="20" style="margin: 5px 16px;" onmou

seo

 ver="smfFooterHighlight(this, true);" onmou

seo

 ut="smfFooterHighlight(this, false);" /></a>
<a href="http://www.

php

 

.net

 /" target="_blank"><img id="powered-

php

 " src="', $settings['images_url'], '/powered-

php

 .gif" alt="', $txt['powered_by_

php

 '], '" width="54" height="20" style="margin: 5px 16px;" onmou

seo

 ver="smfFooterHighlight(this, true);" onmou

seo

 ut="smfFooterHighlight(this, false);" /></a>
</td>
<td valign="middle" align="center" style="white-space: nowrap;">
', theme_copyright(), '
<br/><br/>
<span class="smalltext">'. $settings['custom_copyright'] . '</span>
</td>
<td width="28%" valign="middle" align="', !$context['right_to_left'] ? 'left' : 'right', '">
<a href="http://validator.w3.org/check/referer" target="_blank"><img id="valid-xhtml10" src="', $settings['images_url'], '/valid-xhtml10.gif" alt="', $txt['valid_xhtml'], '" width="54" height="20" style="margin: 5px 16px;" onmou

seo

 ver="smfFooterHighlight(this, true);" onmou

seo

 ut="smfFooterHighlight(this, false);" /></a>
<a href="http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/check/referer" target="_blank"><img id="valid-css" src="', $settings['images_url'], '/valid-css.gif" alt="', $txt['valid_css'], '" width="54" height="20" style="margin: 5px 16px;" onmou

seo

 ver="smfFooterHighlight(this, true);" onmou

seo

 ut="smfFooterHighlight(this, false);" /></a>
</td>
</tr>
</table>';

Now perhaps you're a better man than I, but that just makes my eyes hurt.

Paging NutBalls: Ugly

PHP

  Coder Needs To Be Shot Department on line 2...


/p

hmm... i guess Id better not show what i been working on the past few weeks... lol i have a few of those. 

damn, that is some heinous looking code!  i may be a semi-hack at

php

  still, but i at least think that i produce nice looking code with readable formatting. makes debugging so much easier after the fact.