Why is === faster than == in PHP?

Because the equality operator == coerces, or converts, the data type temporarily to see if it’s equal to the other operand, whereas === (the identity operator) doesn’t need to do any converting whatsoever and thus less work is done, which makes it faster.

=== does not perform typecasting, so 0 == '0' evaluates to true, but 0 === '0' - to false.

There are two things to consider:

1. If operand types are different then == and === produce different results. In that case the speed of the operators does not matter; what matters is which one produces the desired result.

2. If operand types are same then you can use either == or === as both will produce same results. In that case the speed of both operators is almost identical. This is because no type conversion is performed by either operators.

I compared the speed of:

• $a == $b vs $a === $b
• where $a and $b were random integers [1, 100]
• the two variables were generated and compared one million times
• the tests were run 10 times

And here are the results:

 $a == $b $a === $b--------- --------- 0.765770  0.762020 0.753041  0.825965 0.770631  0.783696 0.787824  0.781129 0.757506  0.796142 0.773537  0.796734 0.768171  0.767894 0.747850  0.777244 0.836462  0.826406 0.759361  0.773971--------- --------- 0.772015  0.789120

You can see that the speed is almost identical.