The following page of tests is an interesting examination of script execution times of various PHP functions and code constructs. Some of the findings may surprise you, and even make you think twice about how exactly you code your next script. Programming elegantly is definitely not the same as programming for performance, as many of the following examples will show.

Server setup:

Standard Godaddy.com hosting plan - Linux Hosted Sever with PHP 4.3.11, Zend Engine v1.3.0, Zend Extension Manager v1.0.6, Zend Optimizer v2.5.7, and Apache 1.3.33. PHP claims many optimizations to PHP 5, but Godaddy.com is still using PHP 4, which has proven to be stable.