.. ==================================================
.. FOR YOUR INFORMATION
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.. -*- coding: utf-8 -*- with BOM.

.. include:: Includes.txt

.. _lessons:

==============================
Lessons Learned
==============================

The overall time to parse the TypoScript of a website takes just a few
milliseconds. It is not a critical part of the overall page rendering time. Yet
the development of this extension was also focused on performance.

Time to parse the templates vs. time to parse TypoScript
========================================================

When measured with the TYPO3 core time tracker (admin panel) the template
parsing takes a few hundred milliseconds. When measuring and summing up all
calls to the TypoScript parse function (TypoScriptParser::parse()) it takes
just a few milliseconds. The difference is most likley to be explained by I/O
calls to read the templates.

Non-Recursive Parser
====================

The ``Non-Recursive Parser`` is the approach taken by this parser. The whole
rendering happens within one function by using simple loop structures. Calls to
itself or other methods are avoided as far as reasonable. This turns out to be
twice as fast as the recursive ``Original TypoScript Parser``.

Original TypoScript Parser
==========================

The original parser of the TYPO3 core uses recursive calls to handle the
nesting of the braces of the object name pathes.

JSON Parser
===========

The idea of the ``JSON Parser`` was, to use the PHP function ``json_decode`` to
create the large ``TypoScript`` tree consisting of hundreds of PHP arrays on
the binary level. ``TypoScript`` was rewritten to a valid ``JSON`` string as
input.

Unfortunately ``json_decode`` does merging but not recursive merging.  As
overwriting is a feature of ``TypoScript`` this requires to prepare the
``JSON`` rendering by any approach to do the overwriting in advance. An array
was created, containing the full object path as key and the value as value to
solve this. Although this creates no nested tree, it takes time.

Together with the conversion to a ``JSON`` string in the second step, there is
no advantage in speed. Taking the non-recursive approach to handle the two
steps, it ends up in a similar speed as the ``Original TypoScript Parser``.