Julien Pauli has a new post today sharing an interesting function optimization he found using the Blackfire execution profiler.

This blog post is a technical explanation of a PHP optimization found with BlackFire profiler into a PHP script. The related post is located here : http://blog.blackfire.io/owncloud.html

He found that a replacement of a call to strlen with an isset optimized the script by about 20%. It's not typical though, he explains. He points out that the optimization worked so well because the call was part of a loop. He gets into some of the "under the covers" details of why this speed boost happens and even includes the op code output showing the difference. He then starts getting deep into the internal code for PHP and walks through each step made in the evaluation of a string's length. He finishes the post looking at isset (not technically a function) and how it handles its data checking. He also includes information about opcode caching and how to best maximize its impact.