Which is faster, A or B?
Honestly? Who cares????
This question comes up all the time, and 99 times out of 100, the methods in question are not even close to the real bottleneck in the application.
If you’re asking about a string concatenation operation on the far side of a 250ms database query, son, you’ve got bigger fish to fry. Your time is better spent throwing a where clause on the end of that thing and moving on to fixing your IE6 compatibility.
I intend to write a lot more about this, because its so obnoxiously prevalent in my industry, especially among the hacks that call themselves PHP developers. There is just something frightfully absurd about PHP devs asking inane performance questions and posting ridiculous micro-benchmarks as “proof” of their concerns. PHP was designed to be easy to develop against. It was not designed to be the most performance driven programming language. You don’t get both.
But I digress.