ini - PHP parse_ini_file() performance?

Question

I know some people store settings in an .ini file and get the values with parse_ini_file() in PHP. Without running tests, I am curious about performance.

Do you know if opcode cache can cache any of this type of stuff if setting are in an ini file?

Answer 1

According to this old blog post retrieved from web archives.

From fastest to slowest:

1. Serialized arrays
2. Plain PHP code
3. INI files
4. XML files
5. YAML files

EDIT (08/02/2012)

If APC or other accelerator is available on the server plain PHP files would be the fastest due to fact that they will be parsed only once and kept in memory for further use.