PHP vs HTML

retropunk

I have a client that wants us to create a content management system. There will be about 200 pages. He wants a PHP script to create static HTML pages from an admin tool that we would build. He then would do his daily updates to the site through the tool, click execute and all the HTML pages would be created on the server.
I'd like to create the pages dynamically whenever a page is requested by the end user.
Now if the site is getting 15,000 hits a day, would running a PHP script that dynamically creates pages slow the server down more than having static HTML pages?

Any opinions out there?

Thanks in advance

eoghain

Yes. The simple answer is Yes. Any processing that you do is going to be slower than straight HTML. Since with HTML the web server only has to send the text back to the user and let there browser do the work.

That said would it slow the site down enough for someone to notice it? That all depends on the machine that is running the web server. I don't think that you'd have much of a problem if you built it correctly and are only getting 15000 hits a day. A site like Slashdot has to have there pages pregenerated for them because of the volume that they get, but 15000 hits is nothing. And the advantages of having a fully dynamic site could easily outweigh the slight speed increase. Look at this forum could you imagine waiting for a script to run (maybe hourly) before your message was posted, or my reply? You'd easily be waiting an hour plus to get a reply, and that's if someone answered as soon as your message was posted, and you entered your message just before the update script ran.

superwormy

PHP will be considerably slower, however it will probalby not be noticable to the end user.

Another thing to think about, if its an online shop, and you are dynamically generating pages and the links have query strings:

/showproduct.php?productid=1325

Search engines won't follow those links, so you'll get considerably less traffic. However, STATIC pages like this:

/pagebuilds/1325.html

Search engines WILL FOLLOW, and you'll probably get considerably better search engine rankings, which is very important in online business.

eoghain

There are ways around the search engine issue that superwormy brings up. One of the most used ways is to use Apache's AliasMatch directive to force everything that accesses a directory to use the URL as it's values. I have setup an article site that has a directory called article that I force to go to my script articles.php, and in that script I parse the URL for the values that I need to manipulate my dynamic page. There should be an article on this site about how to do this, but what it boils down to is this URL (mysite.com/article/1) will display my first article and search engines will browse and link that page itself.

superwormy

eoghain is certiantly right, I def. agree, I've done this also fro the articles on these sites:

http://www.customsportswear.com/
http://www.team-sportswear.com/
http://www.durdenwebapplications.com/fishingforgear/

But it's a pain sometimes to deal with, and if youre client already wants pre-generated pages, you might want to just stick with his way. There defintally are alternatives though like eoghain pointed out!

Sxooter

The easiest way to do this is to set up the site as dynamic on port 8080 or something like that, then use wget to "harvest" the site to a directory served by port 80.

That way the boss can look at the site and make changes on the build site at 8080, and when he likes it, he can push it over to 80.

Note that you can't do this with a dynamic application, but for things like a news site, this is the bomb, and can handle HUGE loads.

Plus, it gives you a staging area to make sure you've got a consistent site before you push it.

wget can use a "mirroring" mode where it only downloads the latest version of things, so mostly static content like .gif files and all are fine. Anything that goes through the PHP interpreter is gonna have a timestamp of now() since it will be "dynamically" generated. Even if it's flat html, it will have an updated date stamp and be downloaded.