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Optimize Lexer::readName#1813

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spawnia merged 4 commits intowebonyx:masterfrom
kasparsklavins:patch-1
Dec 15, 2025
Merged

Optimize Lexer::readName#1813
spawnia merged 4 commits intowebonyx:masterfrom
kasparsklavins:patch-1

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@kasparsklavins kasparsklavins commented Dec 10, 2025

Finding the name's length using strspn(...), and doing a single string copy with substr(...) is faster than looping through one character at a time. As names must be [A-Za-z0-9_]+, it's safe to skip UTF8 checks.

Benchmark

Benchmark for introspection query shows promising results on my modest potato running php 8.3 with opcache enabled

bench.php 
use GraphQL\Language\Lexer;
use GraphQL\Language\Source;
use GraphQL\Language\Token;
use GraphQL\Type\Introspection;

require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

$source = new Source(Introspection::getIntrospectionQuery());

$run = function() use ($source) {
    $lexer = new Lexer($source);
    do {
        $token = $lexer->advance();
    } while ($token->kind !== Token::EOF);
};

$run(); // warmup
$run(); // warmup

$times = [];
for ($i = 0; $i < 100; ++$i) {
    $start = hrtime(true);
    $run();
    $times[] = hrtime(true) - $start;
}

var_dump([
    'min' => min($times) / 1_000,
    'max' => max($times) / 1_000,
    'avg' => array_sum($times) / count($times) / 1_000,
]);
Min Max Average
Before 243.5μs 658.6μss 268.1μs
After 168.5μs (-30%) 492.2μs (-25%) 188.4μs (-30%)

spawnia
spawnia reviewed Dec 12, 2025
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Clever, nice find!

kasparsklavins and others added 2 commits December 12, 2025 18:29
@kasparsklavins @spawnia
Extract common $this->source->body
eb83e38 
Co-authored-by: Benedikt Franke <benedikt@franke.tech>
@kasparsklavins
Update changelog
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@spawnia spawnia requested a review from Copilot December 12, 2025 17:29
Copilot AI reviewed Dec 12, 2025
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Pull request overview

This PR optimizes the Lexer::readName method by replacing a character-by-character loop with PHP's native strspn() and substr() functions. Since GraphQL names are restricted to ASCII characters [_A-Za-z][_0-9A-Za-z]*, it's safe to use byte-level string operations without UTF-8 character handling. The optimization yields a 30% performance improvement on introspection query tokenization.

Key changes:

  • Replaced character-by-character loop in readName() with strspn() for counting valid name characters and substr() for extracting the name value
  • Simplified cursor advancement to a single moveStringCursor() call

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 2 out of 2 changed files in this pull request and generated no comments.

File Description
src/Language/Lexer.php Optimized readName() method to use strspn() and substr() instead of character loop
CHANGELOG.md Documented the Lexer name tokenization optimization

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@spawnia spawnia merged commit 59fd4a8 into webonyx:master Dec 15, 2025
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spawnia commented Dec 15, 2025

Thank you @kasparsklavins, released with https://github.com/webonyx/graphql-php/releases/tag/v15.28.0.

@claude claude bot mentioned this pull request Dec 15, 2025
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