Description:
------------
---
From manual page: http://www.php.net/function.dba-fetch
---

This is in reference to this bit of the source, which dates back to 2002, so it's applicable to pretty much any version of php since 4.3: 

https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/master/ext/dba/dba_cdb.c#L160

When you pass a value for $skip to dba_fetch() when reading a cdb database, it'll do $skip reads to bypass those entries. Since a common use case is to do this in a  loop (see script below) to read an indeterminate number of duplicate keys from a database, If there end up being 100 entries, you're actually doing several thousand disk operations.

Test script:
---------------
<?php
// Write a sample cdb to demo on
$values = array_fill(0, 100, 'test value');
$cdb = dba_open('test.cdb', 'n', 'cdb');
foreach($values as $value) dba_insert('test key', $value, $cdb);
dba_close($cdb);

// Now actually show the issue (see attached dtruss link for what's happening)
$cdb = dba_open('test.cdb', 'r', 'cdb');
$cdbSkip = 0;
while ($result = dba_fetch('test key', $cdbSkip, $cdb)) {
  $cdbSkip++;
}


Expected result:
----------------
I'd expect approximately 100 read requests against the cdb from the latter half of the script

Actual result:
--------------
See this output from dtruss: https://gist.github.com/tabacco/86bd9f4b1fd267a62be2

Note the high number of seek and read operations to fetch 100 rows.