PHP: Which is faster - array_sum or a foreach?

Question

I'm trying to work out which method would be faster (if either would be?). I've designed a test here: http://codepad.org/odyUN0xg

When I run that test my results are very inconsistent. Both vary wildly.

Is there a problem with the test?

otherwise, can anyone suggest which one would or wouldn't be faster??

Edit

Okay guys, thanks I've edited the codepad here: http://codepad.org/n1Xrt98J With all the comments and discussion i've decided to go with array sum. As soon as I used that microtime(true) thing it started to look alot faster (array_sum)

Cheers for the advice, oh and I've added a "for" loop so that results are more even, but as noted on the results there is little time saving if any over a foreach.

Answer 1

The problem is that you took a very low limit, 1000. The overhead of the PHP interpreter is MUCH larger. I would take 100000000 or something like that.

However I think array_sum is faster since it's more specialized and probably implemented in fast C.

Oh, and as Michael McTiernan said you must change every instance of microtime() to microtime(true). http://php.net/manual/en/function.microtime.php

And finally, I wouldn't use codepad as testing environment since you have no control over it. You have no idea what happens and whether your process is paused or not.