Accessing Big Arrays in PHP

Question

I\'ve been doing some profiling on different methods of accessing large(ish) arrays of data in PHP. The use case is pretty simple: some of our tools output data into PHP files

Answer 1

For one of my projects in which a database was not an option, I faced the same problem of loading big (by big I mean series of 3 MB files) php files containing arrays in memory and I was looking for options to maximize the performances. I found a very easy one which was caching these files on the disk as json at first use. I divided load time by 3 and also memory peak consumption by 30%. Loading local json file with json_decode() is much much faster than including a big php file containing an array. it also has the advantage of being a format that most languages can manipulate directly. Hope that helps.