Benchmarks

Benchmarks were run on synthetic JSON payloads in Docker (php:8.3-cli-bookworm). Results depend on hardware, payload size, PHP version, and runtime environment. These figures are project-level reference numbers, not universal guarantees.

Run benchmarks locally:

make benchmark

# custom run: iterations, medium payload items, max capacity items
make benchmark BENCH_ITERATIONS=1000 BENCH_ITEMS=500 BENCH_CAPACITY=200000

Core operation comparisons

Operation	Implementation	Ops/sec
Diff	Native PHP	~170
Diff	JsonFast	~570
Schema validation	opis/json-schema	~100
Schema validation	justinrainbow/json-schema	~50
Schema validation	JsonFast	~920

JsonFast diff is roughly 3.3× faster than the native PHP helper in this benchmark. Schema validation is roughly 9× faster than Opis and 18× faster than JustinRainbow on the medium test document.

Plain English: diff and schema checks that used to mean separate PHP helpers or Composer libraries can run in one native call with substantially higher throughput.

Merge / diff throughput

Measured on a ~32 MB JSON payloads (200k items):

Operation	Throughput
Merge	~46 MB/sec
Diff	~38 MB/sec

Large JSON scaling

Capacity benchmark from 1k → 200k items (mean time, ms):

Items	Merge	Diff
1,000	~2	~3
50,000	~160	~210
100,000	~320	~420
200,000	~700	~850

All three operations scale roughly linearly with document size in this test.

What is compared

Category	Compared against
Encode / beautify / minify	json_encode()
Path access	json_decode() + manual traversal
Merge / diff	Native PHP helpers
Schema validation	opis/json-schema, justinrainbow/json-schema

Metrics glossary

Metric	Description
Ops/sec	Operations completed per second
Mean / P95	Average and 95th percentile latency (ms)
Peak memory	Peak allocated memory during benchmark
Large JSON capacity	Scaling test from 1k → 200k nested records

Custom benchmark run:

php -d extension=target/release/libphp_jsonfast.so \
    benchmarks/benchmark.php [iterations] [medium_items] [max_capacity_items]