As you probably realized from the second tutorial of the series, creating timing scripts either by using a procedural methodology or an object-based approach is a hassle-free process. It can be easily achieved by anyone with an intermediate background in PHP.

More specifically, all the practical examples that you saw in the previous parts used the neat "microtime()" built-in PHP function as the real workhorse. It's handy for constructing timer functions or eventual classes. In either case, you can expand the functionality of all these examples and build a full-featured timing system that, obviously, can be implemented for benchmarking purposes too.

This large, complex subject offers numerous possibilities for experimentation, which means that you'll surely have tons of fun creating timing systems with PHP.

Now it's time to pay attention to the topics that will be discussed in this final part of the series. In the preceding tutorial I showed you a few understandable examples of how to use a timer class to spot the differences between fetching rows from a MySQL database table using HTTP compression and without it. This article, then, will be focused on evaluating different scripts that fetch sets of records, first from a database, and then from flat files.

The experience sounds really interesting. Thus, let's not waste more time in preliminaries and start reading!