Benchmarks for the Catchable Memory Error RFC. This suite measures whether the changes on the memory-error branch of ramsey/php-src affect the performance of buffer- and string-returning functions across the standard library and common extensions (arrays, strings, streams, gmp, openssl, pgsql, random, shmop, sockets, sodium, sysvmsg).

The benchmarks run with PHPBench against two PHP builds compiled from identical base images and configure flags (docker/config.release):

• Baseline: php/php-src at commit 9073875eb9, the merge-base where the memory-error branch diverges from master
• memory-error: ramsey/php-src at the tip of the memory-error branch

Requirements

• Docker with Compose v2
• Composer (to install PHPBench)

Setup

Install the project dependencies:

composer install

If your local PHP is missing any of the extensions listed in composer.json, add --ignore-platform-reqs; the benchmarks themselves run inside the containers, where all required extensions are compiled in.

Build both PHP images (each performs a full php-src compile, so this could take a while):

docker compose build

Running the benchmarks

docker compose run --rm php-baseline     # run benchmarks, store results under tag "baseline"
docker compose run --rm php-memory-error # run benchmarks, report side-by-side vs. baseline
docker compose down                      # stop the postgres service when finished

The first command runs the suite on the baseline build and stores the results in .phpbench/ under the tag baseline. The second runs the same suite on the memory-error build and renders the aggregate report with comparison columns against the stored baseline, so you can see the delta for each benchmark directly.

Both containers mount this project root at /workspace, so they share the .phpbench/ results storage. A postgres service starts automatically to back the large-object benchmark (PgsqlLargeObj), which connects to localhost from within the container's network namespace.

Useful variations

Pass any PHPBench arguments by overriding the container command:

docker compose run --rm php-baseline vendor/bin/phpbench run --report=aggregate --tag=baseline --filter=Strings

• Re-running php-baseline stores a new run under the baseline tag; comparisons use the most recent one. Delete .phpbench/ to reset the stored results entirely.
• The memory-error image pins whatever the branch tip was at build time. To pick up new commits, rebuild with docker compose build --no-cache php-memory-error.