Save bandwidth with PHP include ()

Anon

Each page on my website has a piece of code that's identical (the main menu), so I thought I could save bandwidth by cutting out this piece of code, placing it into a shared file and referring to it via php include ().

Obviously, this doesn't help, and I am not expert enough to know why. Maybe the reason is that php files don't get cached on principal (unless you use an extra software program to force caching?). How about including a .html file instead of a .php file? Would that help? Are there any other methods to include a php file that would help saving bandwidth?

Thanks for your wisdom! ;-)

Anon

It won't save bandwidth because the included file gets sent to the browser anyway. The browser doesn't get a bunch of files that supposed to be included, only the final result.

Anon

Thanks, Weedpacket. Yeah, that makes sense - it also explains why I couldn't find an article about this subject in the search engines. ;-)

Does anybody know if it's possible to save bandwidth with this or a similar technique (much like style sheets), or would I have to use frames to achieve that?

saltwater

XML on the client side could do this but few browsers support this (Mozilla 1.0 and MSIE 6.0 only)

saltwater

IE 5 also but not fully ...

Anon

Im new to PHP myself and had a the same question on another forum. I was told that PEAR had a caching system that works, but im not at that level yet and still looking into it. Here is what what i got for a response.

"There are several solutions, from kludgy ones like the one I made for some template engines (www.castagnetto.org/CachedTemplate_page.php), to more sophisticated ones based in PEAR Cache (cvs.php.net/cvs.php/pear/Cache, or http://pear.php.net/package-info.php?pacid=40), which can do caching on the filesystem, other DBs, LDAP, etc. at the script, function, class, or method levels."