PHP slow in large Iterations

Question

For Benchmarking PHP with iterations, I have considered a large for loop

for($j=0;$j<20000000;$j++)
    ;

Executing the same takes around 2.5 seconds in PHP 5.4 with eAccelerator enabled

The same loop in .jsp file takes around 15 milliseconds

for(int j=0;j<20000000;j++)
    ;

Why is there such a huge difference between both of them? Is there a way to make it work faster in PHP

Answer 1

At 15ms the loop was probably optimized by the JIT. Unless you're using the HipHop VM, your PHP loop doesn't really stand a chance.

Keep in mind that the performance of a tight loop is hardly representative of relative performance in the real world with real workloads. Check out The Computer Language Benchmarks Game instead -- and even their far more meaningful measurements are to be taken with a grain of salt.

Answer 2

These types of micro benchmarks should be of no concern.

Anyway this loop is slightly faster:

$i = 20000000;
while($i--);

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/compare.php?lang=java&lang2=php