[_ck_]

Note that microtime is off by at least 15ms on every call by nature, sometimes more depending what the cpu is doing and if you have a multiple core cpu. Sometimes the core clocks can be out of sync! (This is the problem on Dreamhost I believe)

By the way, make sure you notice the new benchmark.php starts with an underscore and delete the old one. But if you are done benchmarking you should delete it altogether or the underscore version will auto-load. The underscore was necessary so it could time the other benchmarks as it loaded before it.

It’s well known in any programming language that constant little echos to the output are much less efficient than buffering and outputting it all at the end. So that’s something like what you were running into.

If you use ob_start permanently, make sure you add the second optional chunked output option so the visitor gets periodic output from it, otherwise they won’t see anything until the entire page is flushed. Visually (and mentally) it’s more rewarding to start seeing some kind of page render the moment you click on something.

(my bb-gzip plugin enforces the chunked output option if you want to see it in action – note that certain server options will de-chunk the output however and ruin the effect like mod_gzip and most proxy caches like squid)