Month: June 2019

Updates on PHP performance increase

While waiting for PHP 7.4 production release and its strong type new feature, I was wondering how the performance increased. A while ago I wrote a small stress test which is not the most reliable in all cases, it just points out some major changes that started occurring in PHP 7.

Since that test, PHP 7.3 was released and now there is a release candidate for 7.4. While the memory usage is the same for my test case since 7.0, the execution time looks better with every new version.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

test=$(cat << 'eot'
$time = microtime(true);

$array = [];
for ($i = 0; $i < 10000; $i++) {
    if (!array_key_exists($i, $array)) {
        $array[$i] = [];
    }

    for ($j = 0; $j < 1000; $j++) {
        if (!array_key_exists($j, $array[$i])) {
            $array[$i][$j] = true;
        }
    }
}

echo sprintf(
    "Execution time: %f seconds\nMemory usage: %f MB\n\n",
    microtime(true) - $time,
    memory_get_usage(true) / 1024 / 1024
);
eot
)

versions=( 5.6 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4-rc )

for v in "${versions[@]}"
do
    cmd="docker run --rm -ti php:${v}-cli-alpine php -d memory_limit=2048M -r '$test'"
    sh -c "echo ${v} && ${cmd}"
done

Results (ignore the absolute values, just watch the differences):

5.6
Execution time: 4.573347 seconds
Memory usage: 1379.250000 MB

7.0
Execution time: 1.464059 seconds
Memory usage: 360.000000 MB

7.1
Execution time: 1.315205 seconds
Memory usage: 360.000000 MB

7.2
Execution time: 0.653521 seconds
Memory usage: 360.000000 MB

7.3
Execution time: 0.614016 seconds
Memory usage: 360.000000 MB

7.4-rc
Execution time: 0.528052 seconds
Memory usage: 360.000000 MB

Merge JSON arrays by key in PostgreSQL

UPDATE:

While testing more cases, I’ve come up with a solution that covers my needs better. Instead of taking distinct values, I used a FULL JOIN between the two data sets:

SELECT json_agg(data) FROM (
	SELECT coalesce(new.id, old.id) AS id, coalesce(new.value, old.value) AS value
	FROM jsonb_to_recordset('[{"id": 1, "value": "A"}, {"id": 2, "value": "B"}, {"id": 3, "value": "C"}, {"id": 6, "value": "6"}]') AS old(id int, value text)
	FULL JOIN jsonb_to_recordset('[{"id": 1, "value": "NEW A"}, {"id": 2, "value": "NEW B"}, {"id": 5, "value": "5"}]') AS new(id int, value text)
	ON old.id = new.id
) data

Given a JSON column which holds an array of objects, each object having “id” and “value” properties, I wanted to update the array with a new one, by merging the values by the “id” property.
If same id is present in an object of both arrays, the new one will be used.

Old:

[
    {"id": 2, "value": "B"},
    {"id": 1, "value": "A"}
]

New:

[
    {"id": 1, "value": "X"},
    {"id": 3, "value": "C"},
    {"id": 4, "value": "C"}
]

Result:

[
    {"id":1, "value":"X"},
    {"id":2, "value":"B"},
    {"id":3, "value":"C"},
    {"id":4, "value":"C"}
]

And I wanted to do this in one database roundtrip, not take the data in back end, merge it, and send it back to the database.

First, I transformed the array objects into records and prioritized the new array by giving its values a position; and I put both sets together:

SELECT 1 AS position, * FROM json_to_recordset('[{"id": 2, "value": "B"}, {"id": 1, "value": "A"}]') AS src(id int, value text) -- old
UNION ALL
SELECT 0 AS position, * FROM json_to_recordset('[{"id": 1, "value": "X"}, {"id": 3, "value": "C"}, {"id": 4, "value": "C"}]') AS dst(id int, value text) -- new

Then I extracted only the id and the value, the position being used only to sort data:

SELECT id, value FROM (
	SELECT 1 AS position, * FROM json_to_recordset('[{"id": 2, "value": "B"}, {"id": 1, "value": "A"}]') AS src(id int, value text) -- old
	UNION ALL
	SELECT 0 AS position, * FROM json_to_recordset('[{"id": 1, "value": "X"}, {"id": 3, "value": "C"}, {"id": 4, "value": "C"}]') AS dst(id int, value text) -- new
) AS ordered ORDER BY position

Next step, I took the distinct rows by id:

SELECT DISTINCT ON (id) id, value FROM (
	SELECT id, value FROM (
		SELECT 1 AS position, * FROM json_to_recordset('[{"id": 2, "value": "B"}, {"id": 1, "value": "A"}]') AS src(id int, value text) -- old
		UNION ALL
		SELECT 0 AS position, * FROM json_to_recordset('[{"id": 1, "value": "X"}, {"id": 3, "value": "C"}, {"id": 4, "value": "C"}]') AS dst(id int, value text) -- new
	) AS ordered ORDER BY position
) data

And finally, the result needs to be converted to JSON:

SELECT json_agg(uniqueid) FROM (
	SELECT DISTINCT ON (id) id, value FROM (
		SELECT id, value FROM (
			SELECT 1 AS position, * FROM json_to_recordset('[{"id": 2, "value": "B"}, {"id": 1, "value": "A"}]') AS src(id int, value text) -- old
			UNION ALL
			SELECT 0 AS position, * FROM json_to_recordset('[{"id": 1, "value": "X"}, {"id": 3, "value": "C"}, {"id": 4, "value": "C"}]') AS dst(id int, value text) -- new
		) AS ordered ORDER BY position
	) data
) uniqueid