PHP 5 Reflection API performance

Question

I\'m currently considering the use of Reflection classes (ReflectionClass and ReflectionMethod mainly) in my own MVC web framework, because I need to automatically instancia

Answer 1

I benchmarked these 3 options (the other benchmark wasn't splitting CPU cycles and was 4y old):

class foo {
    public static function bar() {
        return __METHOD__;
    }
}

function directCall() {
    return foo::bar($_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME']);
}

function variableCall() {
    return call_user_func(array('foo', 'bar'), $_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME']);
}

function reflectedCall() {
    return (new ReflectionMethod('foo', 'bar'))->invoke(null, $_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME']);
}

The absolute time taken for 1,000,000 iterations:

print_r(Benchmark(array('directCall', 'variableCall', 'reflectedCall'), 1000000));

Array
(
    [directCall] => 4.13348770
    [variableCall] => 6.82747173
    [reflectedCall] => 8.67534351
)

And the relative time, also with 1,000,000 iterations (separate run):

ph()->Dump(Benchmark(array('directCall', 'variableCall', 'reflectedCall'), 1000000, true));

Array
(
    [directCall] => 1.00000000
    [variableCall] => 1.67164707
    [reflectedCall] => 2.13174915
)

It seems that the reflection performance was greatly increased in 5.4.7 (from ~500% down to ~213%).

Here's the Benchmark() function I used if anyone wants to re-run this benchmark:

function Benchmark($callbacks, $iterations = 100, $relative = false)
{
    set_time_limit(0);

    if (count($callbacks = array_filter((array) $callbacks, 'is_callable')) > 0)
    {
        $result = array_fill_keys($callbacks, 0);
        $arguments = array_slice(func_get_args(), 3);

        for ($i = 0; $i < $iterations; ++$i)
        {
            foreach ($result as $key => $value)
            {
                $value = microtime(true);
                call_user_func_array($key, $arguments);
                $result[$key] += microtime(true) - $value;
            }
        }

        asort($result, SORT_NUMERIC);

        foreach (array_reverse($result) as $key => $value)
        {
            if ($relative === true)
            {
                $value /= reset($result);
            }

            $result[$key] = number_format($value, 8, '.', '');
        }

        return $result;
    }

    return false;
}