A general performance question

Anon

I'm new at PHP and MySql and am looking to build a website that will have at least 3 databases with plenty of tables(Advertisement, Forum, News, Articles, Links etc.) . My home page will have information presented from all databases and will query all together at least 7 or 8 different tables.
The info on the home page should only need to be updated once a day at first. (Assuming the readers only visit once a day). I know performance is based on page views so let's say there will be enough page views in the future to come to this question.

My webspace provider is pretty cheap and therefore server performance poor.

Now to my question. What would be the best way to produce the homepage with PHP?

Just let the queries ride.
or save the results in an extra file or table that gets 'updated' daily, and query that when the home page is called.

Sooner or later I will move to a better performing server in order to update on the fly, but until then, I don't want to discourage my readers.

A good example is PHPbuilder. There is a very obvíous pause when the home page is loaded.(for the data to be extracted from the databases) Fortunately however it is not too extreme. I figure with my provider a home page like phpbuilder's would take 3 to 4 times longer to build and send.

What should I do?

Anon

From my oppinion you have 3 possible ways to go...

Create all on the fly. My guess is that your bottleneck is not the creation of the pages on the fly, but rather the fact that the server is performing slow in general.. if you're with a bigger host, i guess they shoudl be able to handle your load.
Create a content management tool with php, that updates your HTML pages when you change them. This way only you need to deal with PHP and your readers only see Fix HTML pages.
Create an offline application to produce your pages and them synchornize with your webserver.

Anon

Everit, thanks for your reply.

You say the bottle neck I have is because of poor server performance. However, normal HTML websites are delivered from my provider at an almost acceptable speed. Take a look at my home page (www.webtroniks.de) and tell me what you think of the "performance". Also make note, my home page is just in the rough draft stages. Nothing is working except the home page and the HTML is UGLY.

My provider doesn't make to big a deal about PHP/ MySql support. And they run PHP in protected mode, which I believe also hampers performance. Another point is that the MySql Db support is "General"(This is translated from german.). What could that mean?

I've looked at a web site supported by my provider which makes use of PHP/MySql and it is really slow. Again, cheap and good in Germany is not very common, expensive and good in the norm.(Just look at german products.i.e. BMW)

I think I will go with your third choice.

You mentioned however a content management system could be a choice. Would anybody happen to know if something similiar is already available in the internet? It must be some where.

Your answers would be appreciated.