21CTO

Mar 11, 2024 · Backend Development

How I Slashed PHP 1B‑Row Processing Time from 25 min to 27 s

In this article the author walks through the 1 billion‑row (1brc) challenge, shows a naïve PHP implementation, profiles its bottlenecks, and incrementally applies optimizations—switching from fgetcsv to fgets, using references, adding type casts, enabling JIT and parallel processing—to reduce runtime from 25 minutes to under 30 seconds.