Speeding up array handling
Arrays are a vital part of any PHP program. Indeed, dealing with arrays is unavoidable as much of the real-world data your program handles day to day arrives in the form of an array. One example is data from an HTML form posting. The data ends up in either $_GET or $_POST as an array.
In this section, we'll introduce you to a little-known class included with the SPL: the SplFixedArray class. Migrating your data from a standard array over to a SplFixedArray instance will not only improve performance but requires significantly less memory as well. Learning how to take advantage of the techniques covered in this chapter can have a substantial impact on the speed and efficiency of any program code currently using arrays with a massive amount of data.
Working with SplFixedArray in PHP 8
The SplFixedArray class, introduced in PHP 5.3, is literally an object that acts like an array. Unlike ArrayObject, however, this class requires you to place a hard...
