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lchash

A small PHP extension that provides a string-keyed hash table backed by klib khash. It has two APIs: four procedural functions for a single per-request table (the original 2005 API), and an LcHash class with $obj[$key] access for any number of per-instance tables.

Supports PHP 7.4 through 8.5, NTS and ZTS, on glibc Linux, musl, macOS, *BSD, and Windows.

lchash first shipped on PECL in 2005. The 1.0.0 release rewrites it for PHP 7.4 and later.

When to use this (and when not to)

Don't use it for speed. PHP arrays are faster on insert and lookup at every size we measured. These numbers come from bench/bench.php on a release build of PHP 8.4 NTS (glibc Linux x86_64, -O2):

To reproduce, run php -d extension=$(pwd)/modules/lchash.so bench/bench.php <N>.

At 1M entries, PHP arrays are 1.4x to 1.7x faster on insert and 2x faster on lookup. PHP's HashTable uses a packed bucket layout with inlined zvals and opcode-level array-access specialization, none of which an extension can use.

lchash uses less memory than PHP arrays at every size: about 40% of the array's memory at 10k entries and about 80% at 1M. Keys and values are refcount-shared zend_strings with no per-entry Bucket overhead.

Reasons to use lchash:

• Memory-tight workloads. A long-running CLI worker that holds hundreds of thousands of small string mappings uses less RAM than with arrays.
• Porting C code. If you're migrating a C codebase that uses POSIX hsearch_r, the procedural API's first-writer-wins semantics match glibc hsearch(ENTER).
• Legacy compatibility. The four function names are unchanged from the 2005 PECL release, for codebases that depend on them.
• Learning. It's a small PECL extension with one vendored header, easy to read if you're learning PHP extension development.

For most code, use a PHP array.

Install

PIE (recommended on PHP 8.x)

PIE is the PHP Foundation's successor to PECL. It installs from Packagist and builds against the active php-config.

Then add extension=lchash to your php.ini.

PECL

The package is still on the PECL channel:

From source

Windows

Every release has pre-built .dll zips for PHP 8.3 / 8.4 / 8.5 × x64 / x86 × NTS / TS. Download the matching zip, extract php_lchash.dll into your ext/ directory, and add extension=lchash to php.ini.

API

Procedural (single per-request table)

Object-oriented (multiple per-instance tables)

Semantics

Both APIs:

• n_entries is capped at 1,048,576 (1<<20).
• Keys and values may contain any bytes, including NUL. Comparison is length-aware.
• Keys must be non-empty.

Procedural API:

• One table per request. Calling lchash_create() twice without lchash_destroy() in between emits a warning and returns false. If you don't call lchash_destroy(), the table is freed at request shutdown.
• First writer wins. Inserting an existing key returns true and keeps the old value, like glibc hsearch(ENTER).
• Errors emit E_WARNING and return false, for compatibility with the 2005 API.

OO API:

• Each LcHash instance has its own table, allocated on first write and freed with the object.
• Last writer wins. $lc[$key] = $value overwrites an existing key, as with PHP arrays.
• Errors throw Error (capacity exceeded, empty key, and so on).

Backend

lchash uses one backend on every platform: a vendored copy of klib khash (header-only, MIT-licensed) in khash.h. It has no external dependencies and no build-time probes.

Both APIs hash keys with PHP's DJBX33A (zend_string_hash_val), so collision-DoS exposure is the same as for PHP arrays. klib's open-addressing layout degrades slightly more gracefully than chained buckets under heavy collision.

License

PHP License 3.01 for the extension, MIT for the vendored khash.h (header carries the full notice).