How can performance be impacted by using UTF-8 encoding in PHP files and databases?

Using UTF-8 encoding in PHP files and databases can impact performance due to the increased memory usage and processing required for handling multi-byte characters. To mitigate this impact, you can optimize your PHP code by using functions that are specifically designed for handling UTF-8 strings, such as mb_strlen() instead of strlen().

// Example of using mb_strlen() instead of strlen() for UTF-8 string length calculation
$string = "Hello, 你好";
$length = mb_strlen($string, 'UTF-8');
echo "String length: " . $length;