The Ultimate print versus echo benchmark

Single quotes VS double quotes, sizeof() VS count(), for VS while… A lot of questions have torn the PHP community appart for decades but one of the most debated question is:

What is fastest? print or echo?!

While I do prefer print for aesthetic reason I'll try to answer this once and for all.

The setup

It is always hard to find the correct setup for benchmarking low level langage features, there is always an impact of the script to the actual benchmark so I decided to benchmark directly via my terminal, using php command line and unix time function so that the php script is not polluted by time computing functions to output the time result. Also most of the script will output tons of data, slowing down the rendering in the terminal, so I decided to redirect all output to /dev/null. In the end the benchmark will look like this :

time php script.php > /dev/null

And output something like :

real   0m6.549s
user   0m2.012s
sys    0m1.820s

Round 1 - Fight!

The script will be as simple as it can be, just iterating 10 million times the same function, here is echo.php:

<?php
    for ($i = 0; $i <= 10000000; $i++) {
        echo 'Best benchmark ever';
    }

And the result:

time php echo.php > /dev/null

real    0m5.544s
user    0m2.796s
sys     0m2.743s

Five seconds and a half, not that bad! let's see how print handles this :

<?php
    for ($i = 0; $i <= 10000000; $i++) {
        print 'Best benchmark ever';
    }

And the result:

time php print.php > /dev/null

real    0m5.526s
user    0m2.813s
sys     0m2.708s

All right a little better! print is 0,018 second faster than echo, not much of a difference but that should settle the debate once and for all, unless…

Round 2 - Here comes a new challenger!

And this is when it occured to me… to be honest this thought only is what motivated me to write this post. I've always heard that die() is actually the quickest way to output something, for example <?php die("Hello World!"); would be the fastest ever Hello World you could ever write, but I've never really used die() for that purpose, so lets see what it got!!

<?php
    for ($i = 0; $i <= 10000000; $i++) {
        die('Best benchmark ever');
    }

And the result:

time php die.php > /dev/null

real    0m0.025s
user    0m0.019s
sys     0m0.005s

ZOMG 0.025 motherfucking seconds! That's blazing fast!! So I think the morale is pretty clear: next time you want to optimize your scripts, please think about dying first. I think you'll save everyone a lot of time!

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