It's worth noting this function is surprisingly fast. I first ran it against a ~500KB string on our web server. It found 6 occurrences of the needle I was looking for in 0.0000 seconds. Yes, it ran faster than microtime() could measure.
Looking to give it a challenge, I then ran it on a Mac laptop from 2010 against a 120.5MB string. For one test needle, it found 2385 occurrences in 0.0266 seconds. Another test needs found 290 occurrences in 0.114 seconds.
Long story short, if you're wondering whether this function is slowing down your script, the answer is probably not.
