Equivalent of /dev/null for writing garbage test data?

Question

I need to perform a series of test for picking the fastest branch of code for a set of functions I designed. As this functions output some text/HTML content, I would like to measure the speed without filling the browser with garbage data.

Is there an equivalent to /dev/null in PHP? The closest equivalent to write temporary data I've found are php://temp and php://memory but those two I/O streams store the garbage data and I want for every piece of data to be written in a 'fake' fashion.

I could always write all garbage data in a variable ala $tmp .= <function return value goes here> but I'm sure there must be a more elegant or a better way to accomplish this WITHOUT resorting to functions like shell_exec(), exec(), proc_open() and similar approaches (the production server I'm going to test the final code won't have any of those commands).

Is there an equivalent?

Answer 1

I think your best bet would be a streamWrapper that profiles your output on write with microtime, that you can then stream_wrapper_register . The example in the manual is pretty good.

If your code is not that complicated or you fell this would be overkill, you can just use the ob_start callback handler

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

// For what its worth, this works on CentOS 6.5 php 5.3.3.

$fname = "/dev/null";
if(file_exists($fname))   print "*** /dev/null exists ***\n";

if (is_readable($fname))  print "*** /dev/null readable ***\n";

if (is_writable($fname))  print "*** /dev/null writable ***\n";

if (($fileDesc = fopen($fname, "r"))==TRUE){
    print "*** I opened /dev/null for reading ***\n";
    $x = fgetc($fileDesc);
    fclose($fileDesc);
}

if (($fileDesc = fopen($fname, "w"))==TRUE)
{
    print "*** I opened /dev/null for writing ***\n";
    $x = fwrite($fileDesc,'X');
    fclose($fileDesc);
}
if (($fileDesc = fopen($fname, "w+"))==TRUE) {
    print "*** I opened /dev/null for append ***\n";
    $x = fwrite($fileDesc,'X');
    fclose($fileDesc);
}