Benchmark

There are a lot of other libraries that does the same job as TSantos Serializer like JMS Serializer and Symfony Serializer. However, after making some benchmark in those library, I realized that they have a considerable overhead when serializing some data.

That’s why I decided to write a different technique to serialize complex objects and the results were very satisfactory:

As you can see, TSantos Serializer is 6x and 7x faster than Symfony Serializer and JMS Serializer respectively. This benchmark was generated through the PHPBench.

The source code of this benchmark is available on GitHub so you can clone and run it by yourself.

Performance Notes

The serialization process can be separated in two main operations: compile time and runtime.

Compile time:

Operation that compiles the class metadata and generate the hydrator classes. The compile time has a considerable number of I/O operations which can reduce the performance of your application and you should avoid operations in production environment.

Runtime:

Operation that transforms the data through the hydrators. Very fast after the class metadata is already compiled.

Another important topic about performance is how the serializer will read and write data from your objects. By using explicit accessors and mutators is slightly faster then using reflection to access private/protected properties. Keep this in mind in order to boost your application.