The identity (===) operator behaves identically to the equality (==) operator except no type conversion is done, and the types must be the same to be considered equal.

The == operator will compare for equality after doing any necessary type conversions. The === operator will not do the conversion, so if two values are not the same type === will simply return false. It's this case where === will be faster, and may return a different result than ==. In all other cases performance will be the same.