igbinary PHP extension cuts Redis memory use by up to 68% with one config change

igbinary is a PHP extension that replaces PHP's default text-based serialization with a compact binary format, requiring just a single configuration line and no code changes. Benchmarks on a Laravel app using PHP 8.4, phpredis 6.3, and Redis 7 showed memory savings of 47–68% depending on payload size. While igbinary's deserialization was marginally slower on small, unique data like session payloads due to a fixed per-call setup cost, it was up to 94% faster on larger, repetitive data structures thanks to string deduplication. End-to-end Redis round-trip tests showed net speed gains of around 5–6% even for session data, as smaller payloads reduce bytes transferred and stored. JSON serialization performed worse than igbinary in both size and decode speed across all tested payloads.