Performance of variable expansion vs. sprintf in PHP

Question

Regarding performance, is there any difference between doing:

$message = \"The request $request has $n errors\";

and

$messa         


        

Answer 1

Ultimately the 1st is the fastest when considering the context of a single variable assignment which can be seen by looking at various benchmarks. Perhaps though, using the sprintf flavor of core PHP functions could allow for more extensible code and be better optimized for bytecode level caching mechanisms like opcache or apc. In other words, a particular sized application could use less code when utilizing the sprintf method. The less code you have to cache into RAM, the more RAM you have for other things or more scripts. However, this only matters if your scripts wouldn't properly fit into RAM using evaluation.