I made a PHP app which was taking about ~0.0070sec for execution. Now, I added a hashtable array with about 2000 values. Suddenly the time for execution has gone up to ~0.0700 secs. Almost 10 times the previous value. I tried commenting out the part where I was searching inside the hashtable array (but array was still left defined). Still, the execution time remains about ~0.0500secs. Array is something like: $subjectinfo = array( 'TPT753' => 'Industrial Training', 'TPT801' => 'High Polymeric Engineering', 'TPT802' => 'Corrosion Engineering', 'TPT803' => 'Decorative ,Industrial And High Performance Coatings', 'TPT851' => 'Project'); Is there any way to optimize this part? I cannot use Database as I am running this app on Google app engine which is still not supporting JDO database for php. Some more code from the app: function getsubjectinfo($name) { $subjectinfo = array( 'TPT753' => 'Industrial Training', 'TPT801' => 'High Polymeric Engineering', 'TPT802' => 'Corrosion Engineering', 'TPT803' => 'Decorative ,Industrial And High Performance Coatings', 'TPT851' => 'Project'); $name = str_replace("-", "", $name); $name = str_replace(" ", "", $name); if (isset($subjectinfo["$name"])) return "(".$subjectinfo["$name"].")"; else return ""; } Then I am using the following statement 2-3 times in the app: echo $key." ".$this->getsubjectinfo($key)