Ben Maynard's blog about anything

To improve the performance of your PHP application, you should work with object properties directly, rather than writing naive settings and getters. If you need getter/setters, you can use the __get and __set magic methods.

I have performed a quick test with the following script (base code is from google performance tips) to show the performance savings.

php -d implicit_flush=off -r ‘class dog { public $name = “”;} $rover = new dog(); for ($x=0; $x<10; $x++) { $t = microtime(true); for ($i=0; $i<1000000; $i++) { $rover->name = “rover”; $n = $rover->name;} echo microtime(true) – $t;echo “\n”;}’
0.27138209342957
0.27215003967285
0.27119302749634
0.27127695083618
0.27089595794678
0.27323412895203
0.27595901489258
0.27139592170715
0.27534413337708
0.27470207214355

php -d implicit_flush=off -r ‘class dog {public $name = “”;public function setName($name) {$this->name = $name; }public function getName() {return $this->name; } }$rover = new dog();for ($x=0; $x<10; $x++) { $t = microtime(true);for ($i=0; $i<1000000; $i++) { $rover->setName(“rover”);$n = $rover->getName();}echo microtime(true) – $t;echo “\n”;}’
0.88418102264404
0.90805292129517
0.88095903396606
0.9102931022644
0.88606786727905
0.91241002082825
0.88503313064575
0.90973210334778
0.87963604927063
0.91335105895996

php -d implicit_flush=off -r ‘class dog {public $name = “”;public function __set($key, $value) {$this->$key = $value;}public function __get($key) {return $this->$key;}}$rover = new dog(); for ($x=0; $x<10; $x++) { $t = microtime(true); for ($i=0; $i<1000000; $i++) { $rover->name = “rover”; $n = $rover->name;} echo microtime(true) – $t;echo “\n”;}’
0.27974605560303
0.28078198432922
0.27995705604553
0.280522108078
0.27998900413513
0.28067207336426
0.27970504760742
0.28028988838196
0.27951693534851
0.28037190437317