msgpack.php VS smaz

That's enough theory, let's start coding! For these examples, we'll use the msgpack.php MessagePack library since it provides a convenient API to handle extension types. I hope you'll find these code examples easy to understand even if you use other libraries. Since I mentioned UUID, let's implement support for this data type as an example. To do so, we'll need to write an extension---a class to serialize and deserialize UUID values. We will use the symfony/uid library to make handling such values easier.

I recently encountered an interesting case. I was trying to optimize the MessagePack unpacking, but after testing the performance of the new faster (as I thought) version, it turned out to be slower than the original implementation. Trying to figure out which part of the code was causing the slowdown, I reran the tests with Blackfire and was surprised to see that the profiler reported a 30% improvement in the new version, which was the exact opposite of my results (read the comments on the linked issue to learn why). Note that this is not a problem with this particular profiler, most PHP profilers will do the same. So I decided to share this finding and encourage you not to blindly trust profilers and always do your own benchmarking, especially when you do such micro-optimizations.

Choose the data compression algorithm based on the specifics of your data. For example, if you are working with lots of short strings, take a look at [*SMAZ](https://github.com/antirez/smaz).*

smaz - Efficient string compression library. BSD-3-Clause