README

This is an experimental PHP library that helps reduce the memory footprint when creating and using small-sized associative arrays in large quantities.

Important note: This library is not production-ready yet!

General information

This library was inspired by various algorithms used in databases and other languages (e.g. Redis). The idea is to convert small hash tables to linear data structures and store them inside a single string. This approach results in reduced memory consumption, not to mention cache locality. Obviously, the time complexity increases to O(n), but given the small size of the dataset the practical difference is vanishingly small.

Advantages

Plain PHP code
Supports PHP 5.4 and later
Consumes ~4 times less memory than associative arrays
Consumes ~2 times less memory than objects (DTOs)

Disadvantages

Works substantially slower than arrays and objects
Cannot be used instead of arrays in all scenarios (see examples below)

Use cases

A lot of 1-dimensional arrays with dynamic string keys and rather small values
A lot of foreach loops over these arrays
Minimum update/delete operations

Requirements

PHP 5.4 or newer (not tested yet with PHP 5!)
JSON extension (for older PHP versions)

Installation

composer require dmitry-kirillov/simplepack

Usage

Objects of this class can be used instead of associative arrays in most scenarios:

$data = new Simplepack();
$data['name'] = 'John';
$data['age'] = 30;
$data['is_married'] = true;

foreach ($data as $key => $value) {
    // Your code here...
}

However, it is important to remember that certain functions and operators won't work:

$keyExists = array_key_exists('name', $data); // PHP Fatal error
$data['age']++; // PHP Notice; the value stays the same

Known Issues

Extremely high CPU usage
No support for 32-bit systems

License

MIT

dmitry-kirillov / simplepack

Maintainers

Details