Jarlsberg's Journal: A note on modulus

Using bitwise operators are faster than modulus operators, right? Apparently this is not the case with PHP.

At Magicode.org, I've taken a hard look at whether using a ternary operator is faster than using modulus. I entered into this thinking the answer was obvious, the bitwise operator would win, hands down. Turns out, it ain't so.

Running several loops in varying steps, the most intensive being a consecutive loop from 0 to 1000000 (million) showed that $i%2 was significantly faster than $i&1==0, being about 9% faster in most tests. The results and the script used to verify the results are available at magicode.org.

So, there you go folks, modulus wins.