Test: ord v. unpack (str keys)

Does unpack (with its strange format string) go any faster than creating your own associative array?

Historical Results

Based on (2) saved test runs, The test labeled "ord()" was (on average) the faster by 0.0067 seconds, (0.792% faster)

ord() 100%

unpack() 99.208%

The ord() test took 0.8368 seconds.
The unpack() test took 0.8435 seconds.

Nitty-Gritty

Each test case ran 20 random code order iterations consisting of 185,004 loops for a total of 3,700,080 runs.

Line execution difference (0.000002) milliseconds.
Avg difference (0.000) milliseconds per 185,004 loops.
Total difference 6.68 milliseconds for 3,700,080 loops

The iteration variablity for Code 1 was (0.0000) milliseconds and Code 2 was (0.0000) milliseconds. The lower and the closer together there values are the more accurate the results are.

Code

The first test, "ord()", was:

$GLOBALS['dummy'] = array(
	'a' => ord($GLOBALS['packed']{0}),
	'b' => ord($GLOBALS['packed']{1}),
	'c' => ord($GLOBALS['packed']{2}),
	'd' => ord($GLOBALS['packed']{3}),
);

The second test, "unpack()", was:

$GLOBALS['dummy'] = unpack('Ca/Cb/Cc/Cd', $GLOBALS['packed']);

PHP Benchmarks