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@nikic
nikic / objects_arrays.md
Last active June 3, 2026 09:48
Post explaining why objects often use less memory than arrays (in PHP)

Why objects (usually) use less memory than arrays in PHP

This is just a small post in response to [this tweet][tweet] by Julien Pauli (who by the way is the release manager for PHP 5.5). In the tweet he claims that objects use more memory than arrays in PHP. Even though it can be like that, it's not true in most cases. (Note: This only applies to PHP 5.4 or newer.)

The reason why it's easy to assume that objects are larger than arrays is because objects can be seen as an array of properties and a bit of additional information (like the class it belongs to). And as array + additional info > array it obviously follows that objects are larger. The thing is that in most cases PHP can optimize the array part of it away. So how does that work?

The key here is that objects usually have a predefined set of keys, whereas arrays don't:

@handerson
handerson / mysqlfix.sh
Created March 27, 2012 16:52 — forked from davejlong/mysql client
How to setup the MySQL client and MySQLDump client on Mac OS x from MySQL Workbench
#MySQL Client
ln -s /Applications/MySQLWorkbench.app/Contents/Resources/mysql /usr/bin/mysql
#MySQL Dump
ln -s /Applications/MySQLWorkbench.app/Contents/Resources/mysqldump /usr/bin/mysqldump
#How to fix the "Library not loaded: libmysqlclient.18.dylib (LoadError)" error
sudo ln -s /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib