Well, according to the documentation, it returns 1 always. I believe print() is meant to be used as a function like this; while(print('string')) { } PHP: Anyways, echo is faster because there's no return value. I'm sure the difference is minimal.
It depends on how you are using it. Tested across a high end VPS, dedicated server, local server (debian, ubuntu, centos) using 50k iterations of a string print is actually faster. If you are concat'ing strings, echo is far far slower.... However, if you use comma seperated values as you are meant too (but no-one does :|) then echo is the faster of the two..... Buy saying "echo is faster than print" is not, nowadays, correct [in the above setups]. Of course, it is faster to type since its one less character.....
No, you are right - even on such as redundant test as i mentioned there wasnt much in it so for production code its barely measurable.
In all actuality, Echo and Print differ based on how they are structured. Print returns a value much like a normal function would. But despite common belief, Print is not a function, as we can see by the fact that it doesn’t require parenthesis to work (Not to be confused with Printf). Print and Echo are actually both called language constructs, although this isn’t to say that we can’t make Print act like a function.
depending upon our requirement we have to use them..., echo will never returns any value so for just print statements we can use if..,print for others....!!