Yeah, I read that article and it looks pretty bad using both those methods together and he seemed to favor using variable number of arguments passed to the method.
Apart from the fact that this is a fairly bad look for PHP I wonder how many plugins are cpu bound rather than database access bound as you would have to be calling those plugin methods a lot to incur that 17 second penalty.
Just to make sure we’re clear, “significant” here means as little as 1 microsecond (Larry Garfield’s test) or as much as 5 microseconds (Paul M Jones’s test). Don’t forget that they iterate their tests to accumulate numbers that actually look significant. In Larry’s case, he used 2 million iterations.