PHP package needs to speed up

[pietercolpaert]

Right now, our script runs really slow... I'm sure that using a couple of techniques, we could make this code way more efficient. A couple of options I'm thinking about:

• Hard code the stations list
• Optimise the regular expressions to fit in one regular expression max
• Use a different data structure for the autocomplete list which can be generated from the build.js script (prefix tree)
• ...

[Bertware]

@pietercolpaert testing on my system has shown php7 achieved 19x faster responses compared to php5.6 without APC (for APC, see #111 and #112). With APC, there was a 12x performance gain by using php7. Can you try this as well? If you or anyone else experience the same speed improvement, we should consider switching to php7.

See these results, for php5 and php7, each with apc enabled/disabled. Testing method from #111 .

Using both PHP7 and APC would result in a 2000x performance gain. I guess that's enough for you? ;)

php5 ~/.composer/vendor/bin/phpunit
Testing 100 liveboards took an average of 1747.603430748 ms for 1 liveboard, with APC disabled.

php5 -d apc.enable_cli=1 ~/.composer/vendor/bin/phpunit 
Testing 100 liveboards took an average of 10.28352022171 ms for 1 liveboard, with APC enabled.

php7 ~/.composer/vendor/bin/phpunit 
Testing 100 liveboards took an average of 92.941551208496 ms for 1 liveboard, with APC disabled.

php7 -d apc.enable_cli=1 ~/.composer/vendor/bin/phpunit 
Testing 100 liveboards took an average of 0.79075813293457 ms for 1 liveboard, with APC enabled.