Concatenation, multiple parameters or sprintf?

Question

I am working to optimize my PHP code and found out that you can speed up echoing in these ways - exactly, you can replace echo "The name of the user is $name" . "."; with:

• echo 'The name of the user is '.$name.'.';
• echo "The name of the user is", $name, ".";
• echo sprintf("The name of the user is %s", $name);

Which one is the fastest? I'd like not only to see benchmarks, but also some technical explaination, if possible.

Answer 1

Firstly, this is micro optimization and you're probably better paying for a faster server and developing more product then spending hours and hours micro optimizing. However according to http://micro-optimization.com/ here are the results:

sprintf() is slower than double quotes by 138.68% (1.4 times slower)

and

sprintf() is slower than single quotes by 163.72% (1.6 times slower)

Answer 2

The above comments are relevant. There are better ways to optimize your code.

That said, the best ways to optimize strings is to pop them into a list and then concatenation the list. Have a look at this post as a good starting point.