Create static html page from original php file

Anon

My php/MySQL forum works great, but as the article count rises is takes sometime for the php code to display the page. The article list page does not get changed that often. Only when a new post is added or one removed. Instead of having the php display code access the database and output all the articles everytime someone views the list, I want to create a static html page of the article list. I know I could rewrite the code to wirte every printf to a file but that seems like a waste of effort. The php code already displays the html info once it is parsed to the browser so should it be easy to just redirect this to a file. I mean instead of the web server calling the php parser/compiler and having the html output to it, I would like to just call the php parser/compiler on my original file and redirect the output to a file.
Is this possible??

Anon

What you're describing is a classic need to cache the results of queries. If your code is modular, the component that retrieves the article list should be written as
do I have this cached?
if so, serve it
else
retrieve it, cache it, and serve it

See the manual entry for set_file_buffer().

Note that when you begin to cache items, you are in essence creating multiple databases and introducing coherency issues. There are various strategies for dealing with this.

One is to cache for a finite amount of time, which makes the pseudocode like so

do I have this cached?
if so, is it newer than x minutes?
if so serve it
else
retrieve it, cache it, and serve it

Another is to flush the cache any time a record is inserted into the database.

One last issue. Are you certain that the database access is the bottleneck here? It may not be. If you are displaying the article list in a heavily formatted table (as you commonly see on Phorum systems, including this one) you may be observing the interaction of tables and the Web browser. If you're sending 90% formatting and 10% content, and the browser is spending its time calculating table dimensions (particularly a problem with Netscape), that may be the culprit, and not MySQL.