We have seen in this chapter how each element in a PHP array has a very big overhead of memory. Since it is done by the language itself, there is very little we can do over here, except that we use SplFixedArray instead of a regular array where it is applicable. But if we move from our PHP 5.x version to the new PHP 7, then we can have a huge improvement in our application, whether we use regular PHP array or SplFixedArray.

In PHP 7, the internal implementation of a hash table has been changed drastically and it is not built for efficiency. As a result, the overhead memory consumption for each element has gone down significantly. Though we can argue that less memory consumption does not make a code speedy, we can have a counter argument that if we have less memory to manage, we can focus more on execution rather than memory management. As a result, we have some impact on the performance.

So far from the discussion, we can easily say the newly improved array in PHP 7 is definitely a recommended choice for developers to solve complex and memory efficient applications.