PHP Efficiency Comparison

[jaylee]

If I'm going to write a PHP script which is only going to perform background tasks on MySQL database manipulation for visitor analysis.

Which of the following way is more efficient:

1. serving a static html page, calling the script via <script src=/myscript.php></script>

2. serving a static html page, calling the script via <img src=/myscript.php></script>

3. serving the html content via the script myscript.php and then serve the html content all in one script.

[jaylee]

2. Should be <img src=/myscript.php></img>

[[deleted]]

The most efficient method is:
4. Don't include anything, and look at the webservers logfiles instead.

[jaylee]

3. serving the html content via myscript.php, and then do the database manipulation all in one script.

[jaylee]

hi vincent,

What I'm trying to do is counting the number of visitors on-line. The script is going to execute as many times as the page is being displayed and expired the users off-line. That's something I can't see in the server log file.

I've already had a php written to perform this task, now I'm just wondering what's the most efficient way to call this script?

[[deleted]]

You are aware that the information you are creating is near-useless? (ie: don't spend too much time on it because no visitors really care about it)

BTW you can definately see it in the logfile, but you'll have to read the content of the logfile regularly. Most webservers (good ones) can deliver multiple copies of the logfile, so you could set one to log to disk, and another to log directly to a script.

But that's all theory.

If you go for the <script> method you may get browsers that don't support it.
If you go for the <img> method you'll need PHP to deliver a valid image. This may be a single-pixel gif, but it must be a valid image or you'll get an error on the page.
The full-PHP method taskes the most server-resources, but does not cause an extra hit on your webserver.

I'd go with the IMG method.

But please, re-consider wether this information is really usefull...
There's nothing more embarressing than visiting a website where it says
"current visitors: 2"

[jaylee]

Hi vincent,

Thank you for your advice. I'm working on this as an experiment for efficiency test.

Another question regarding to MySQL, when I have this script up and running, I use the 'top' command to check my server load, there's about 260 processes of mysqld running. Is this number too high?

Is each execution of the script to connect to the database going to create a new process? By the way, I'm using 'pconnect()'

[[deleted]]

As you may know (I guess you read the manual) pconnect keeps connections open for a long time.

This means that your scripts can connect to the database faster, because PHP re-uses existing connections.
The downside is that many connections stay open.

Wether that is a problem depends on your server's specs.
If you have enough memory you can keep a lot of connections open.

[jaylee]

Is the Max_Connections in MySQL having anything to do with MaxClients in Apache?

[[deleted]]

Sort of.
Every apache child process can run a php script, so the more apache processes, the more mysql connections.