How much does comments affect execution speed?

[otseng]

I was wondering how much does comments affect execution speed. Will there be any appreciable difference if there are no comments or if there are tons of comments? Does it make a difference? Has anyone done any benchmarking on this?

[Weedpacket]

Unless you want to get really pathological (a one-line script buried among 10MB of comments), then there is no appreciable difference.

[Drakla]

http://www.zend.com/zend/week/week135.php

Their quote "If 40%+ of your total script size are comments you may see something like a 2-4% performance boost if you remove those comments for files >40kb."

Now it doesn't say whether that's a script just doing calculations or if it's doing a reasonable amount of outputting. Combine the script execution with the relative slowness of the net and it's possible even more insignificant.

[otseng]

OK, thanks for the response.

[Weedpacket]

The delay with comments comes with the initial reading and parsing of the script. PHP needs to allocate memory to store them, but they don't affect execution.