Larry Garfield has put together some benchmarks based around a request he had from other developers (the "performance czars") as to how the magic functions in PHP5 would perform in the new environment.

Already, there is talk of how, and if, to leverage PHP 5's object handling now that we don't need to deal with the weirdness of PHP 4's object model. Of course, because it's Drupal, our army of performance czars want to know just what the cost is for object handling, and especially advanced object magic like __get(), __call(), the ArrayAccess interface, and so forth.

He an his tests on a Thinkpad (Intel Core2 Duo 2.2Ghz) running Kubuntu and PHP 5.2.3. They were run two million times benchmarking the different methods for:

• function calls
• __call
• __get
• __set
• iterators (array)
• inheritance
• composition

His results are listed at the end of the post.