Matthew Weier O'Phinney has a new post to his blog (following this post on directory iteration for autoloading) with some of the benchmarks of different methods he tried for automatically loading the libraries his scripts needed on demand.

During the past week, I've been looking at different strategies for autoloading in Zend Framework. I've suspected for some time that our class loading strategy might be one source of performance degradation, and wanted to research some different approaches, and compare performance. In this post, I'll outline the approaches I've tried, the benchmarking strategy I applied, and the results of benchmarking each approach.

His testing included a baseline of the Zend Framework 1.x series loading, a naming/class standard following the PEAR standards and class mapping with file/class name pairs. He includes his benchmarking strategy and the scripts he used to run the tests (on github here). He ran them both with and without opcode caching to give a better overall performance view.