Building a High-Performance Keccak-256 Extension for PHP: 14-16 Faster

The Problem:
Pure PHP Keccak hashing: 0.28-0.44ms per hash
At scale, this makes Ethereum development impractical

The Solution:
C extension using direct memory operations
Benchmarked results: 0.018-0.032ms per hash

Performance:

• Intel i3-2130 (2011): 0.032ms vs 0.443ms = 14× faster
• AMD Ryzen 7 3700X: 0.018ms vs 0.280ms = 16× faster
• Works in Docker and bare metal

Real-world impact:

• 1M hashes: 18-32 seconds (native) vs 4.6-7.4 minutes (pure PHP)
• 10M hashes: 3-5 minutes (native) vs 46-74 minutes (pure PHP)

Use Cases:

• Ethereum address derivation
• Transaction hashing
• dApp backends
• Any high-throughput crypto work

Installation:

bash
git clone https://github.com/BuildCoreWorks/php-keccak256.git
cd php-keccak256
phpize && ./configure && make && sudo make install