Benchmark 1: variable replacement

About 1MB data is created, parsed and displayed ... this might take a while. In this test we have a 10kb text file which has 21 variable in it. Different amount of variables is set in template engine, we measure how fast it can parse this text. If you choose to look at the source code of this site, you will find this text very often, because a template class is slower if it actually has to display the text. I put it in "<!-- -->" so it is not displayed here.

View source code of this benchmark.

TEST 1.1 :: 20 registered vars :: 10 iterations

%	name	total time	average iteration time	bar
100%	vlibTemplate	5ms	0.0048208
108%	patTemplate	5ms	0.0051915
126%	TinyButStrong	6ms	0.0060963
246%	Easy Template System	12ms	0.0118689
407%	Smarty	20ms	0.0196407
573%	PHP: HereDoc syntax	28ms	0.0276225
587%	FastTemplate	28ms	0.0282901

TEST 1.2 :: 5 registered vars :: 10 iterations

%	name	total time	average iteration time	bar
100%	PHP: HereDoc syntax	0ms	0.0001758
919%	Easy Template System	2ms	0.0016148
1413%	Smarty	2ms	0.0024842
2091%	vlibTemplate	4ms	0.0036766
2651%	patTemplate	5ms	0.004661
3694%	TinyButStrong	6ms	0.0064942
8587%	FastTemplate	15ms	0.0150952

TEST 1.3 :: 100 registered vars :: 5 iterations

%	name	total time	average iteration time	bar
100%	PHP: HereDoc syntax	0ms	0.000458
442%	Easy Template System	1ms	0.0020238
681%	Smarty	2ms	0.0031188
1498%	TinyButStrong	3ms	0.0068604
1517%	vlibTemplate	3ms	0.0069458
1655%	patTemplate	4ms	0.0075812
3538%	FastTemplate	8ms	0.0162062

To show the speed of template engines, I integrated the PHP heredoc syntax.

Why is ETS so fast? ETS does not work with OOP. It uses functions not methods to exchange data between the PHP script and the template. I can only assume this different aproach to programming is a reason for the high performance.

Why are Smarty and vlibTemplate so fast? Smarty and vlibTemplate are using compiled templates. E.g. Smarty PHP files are using fast "for ... endfor;" and "echo" statements. Since this PHP file is only changed if the template is changed, this is extremly fast and it does not matter if the (mysql)data is changed. This makes Smarty the fastes template engine available on Windows. vlibTemplate is faster than Smarty on most Linux servers I tested. But that may change, since Smarty is released more often than vLIB.

If you do not have the time to take a deeper look into Smarty, ETS or other template engines or vlibTemplate I suggest you use vlibTemplate. In my humble opinion vLIB (vlibTemplate, vlibDate, vlibMimeMail) is one of the best packages (3 classes) I have ever worked with.