A simple benchmark to use League\Csv

benchmark.php

<?php

use League\Csv\Writer;

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

function generateRandomString($length = 10)
{
    $characters = '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ';
    $str = '';
    for ($i = 0; $i < $length; $i++) {
        $str .= str_shuffle($characters)[0];
    }

    return $str;
}

/**
 * Using PHP 5.5 generator to ease memory usage
 */
function generateRawData($start, $end)
{
    for ($i = $start; $i < $end; $i++) {
        /*yield [
            generateRandomString(rand(5, 10)),
            generateRandomString(rand(5, 10)),
            generateRandomString(rand(5, 10)),
            generateRandomString(rand(5, 10)),
            generateRandomString(rand(5, 10)),
            generateRandomString(rand(5, 10)),
            generateRandomString(rand(5, 10)),
            generateRandomString(rand(5, 10)),
            generateRandomString(rand(5, 10)),
        ];*/
        yield [
            'JuKriljX',
            'UJ2tpFl20E',
            'JbsEKRYuvs',
            'sN8XgYlPG',
            'KtQcNZ2',
            'LfaSslTtKk',
            '59XtNhhJM',
            'TzgPzFX09',
            'xzBRbSHr'
        ]; // not using the generateRandomString() improve the time (<- this mimic more importing data from a DB)
    }
}

$start = microtime(true);
$loop = $start;
$threshold = 10000;
$nbrows = 100000;
$csv = new Writer('result.csv', 'w'); //to work make sure you have the write permission
foreach (generateRawData(0, $nbrows) as $offset => $row) {
    $csv->insertOne($row);
    if ($offset > 0 && $offset % $threshold == 0) {
        $new_loop = microtime(true);
        $duration = $new_loop - $loop;
        $loop = $new_loop;
        echo $threshold,' rows added in ', $duration, ' seconds', PHP_EOL;
    }
}
$duration = microtime(true) - $start;
echo $nbrows, ' added in ', $duration, ' seconds', PHP_EOL;
die(0);

I used the following script to benchmark the League\Csv insert performance. On my Ubuntu 13.10

PHP Version: PHP 5.5.3-1ubuntu2.6 (cli) (built: Jul  7 2014 16:54:53)
RAM : 2 GiO
Processor: Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU E7200 @ 2.53GHz × 2 

It took me 10.7 seconds to process 100 000 rows.