Elliott Brueggeman - PHP and Web Development Information

This is a problem that pertains to every programmer, and over thousands of lines of code, performance slow downs can really add up based on a programmer's loop preference. Obviously there are situations where one is more suited to the task than the other two, but there are others where a developer may just pick a loop that they are most comfortable using. We will test the performance implications of all three.

Test Environment: Linux, Apache, PHP 5.2.17.

Test Setup: Code constructs listed below. For loops used to have enough iterations to make the script execution time calculatable. Each test was run 3000 times to get the average.

Comparisons

Using a for loop

for($i=0; $i<100000; $i++)
{ 
	//Do Something
}

Using a while loop

$i=0;
while($i<100000)
{ 
	//do something
	$i++;
}

Using a do while loop

$i=0;
do
{ 
	//do something
	$i++;
	
} while($i<100000);

Results
Test	Avg Execution Time	Comparative Graph - (longer is slower, 100% is the fastest time)
for loop	23.44 ms	102%
while loop	24.65 ms	107%
do while loop	22.96 ms	100%

Discussion: The Do While loops is the fastest (strange) followed by the for loop and the while loop. I actually thought that the for loop would be slower than the while loop given its shortcut format (from my experience, shortcuts in syntax mean longer execution times.)