Performance of rendering the output of a view with Custom Formatters vs. native fields in Views

Hey,

Was wondering if you would expect to see performance improvements/reductions/nothing by using custom formatters to render the output of a view compared to the "native" UI approach of excluding fields from display and using the tokens in a custom text field.

I suspect that it could be faster to use custom formatters as afaik the view has to pull up a tpl.php template for every field required by the view which seems like a relatively slow way to do things to me.

Also, in the case of Views rows where you're using PHP to process the row for output, this gets run through eval() by Views, right? Does custom formatters do anything different here that could avoid eval()?

I don't have any benchmarks, I haven't even used custom formatters myself yet but it has been recommended to me a few times now by people I work with :)

I'm hoping to get some performance improvements on some Views of mine that have some relatively complex logic rendering each row and I'm looking for some easy wins that I can apply across a whole project and deploy cleanly (isn't that all anybody wants always...). It seemed feasible to me that swapping out field stylings for a custom formatter might help, but before I start playing around myself I wanted to see if anybody else had some benchmarks, theoretical insight on the inner workings of the two modules or just anecdotal evidence as to whether this would make any difference in general.

I opened a ticket so that others who come after me can benefit from the discussion :)