speed question

Anon

if we have two php files.. one containing all the html like...

<?
echo "<html...

echo "he";
echo "hehe2";

...
?>

or a php file that is in fact an html and contains inside the file
(html...)

<? echo "heh"; ?>
(html...)

<? echo "ehhe2"; ?>

(html...)

i mean.. the fact of using <? code ?> twice or more will make it slower than using <? ?> and include all the html inside... it uses php less times right ?

i don't know if i makemyself clear.. my english sucks 🙂

Anon

I actually think it'd be faster. The thing is that if you output HTML through "echo" statements (like your first example), PHP has to parse the statement, do variable interpolation (because you're using double quotes) and then output it. If you have HTML output the <? ?> (like your second example), PHP just outputs everything regardless of what it is. So I think the second method is faster, since PHP has to do less overall processing.

But you shouldn't need to worry about this. In my opinion, this will only impact the speed by a small factor...you should worry about other bottlenecks like image manipulations, database connections, etc.

Diego

Anon

Yeah, given the PHP compiler things like how you echo blocks of html probably all come out in the wash, anyway.

But in the long run, the second method does come out a bit faster for the reasons you describe; but not by all that much. It's biggest advantage is that it's a good deal easier to read.

Anon

but calling php once wouldn't be faster that requiring 2 or more times the compiler ?

and btw.. should we do a mysql_free_result in the end of every DB use or that will make things slow with alot of users ? i mean..

i'll really interrested in those small details of speed because i'm beggining to work with medium portals

Anon

No; PHP is run once per script, and the whole file (and any included files) is passed through it in one go, HTML and all.

The only difference is that the PHP parser doesn't try and interpret the HTML as PHP code; but then, it doesn't do that when it's reading a 'single-quoted string' either, so that's no big deal. It does have to be a bit more careful with "double-quoted strings", 'cos then it has to look out for interpolated variables. Again, though, the compiler sorts all that out before script execution, so the difference is negligible. From experimental timings I've seen the difference is on the order of a millisecond or so.

PHP has to read the entire file regardless of how many or how few <?php ?> groups there are, for the simple reason that it has to find the <?php ?> groups anyway.

If you're really interested, you can dig through the source code!