Some advice please

[portaloo]

Can anyone tell me if what I have in mind makes sense, add any thoughts or correct mistakes on this please.
You can check out what I've posted to test so far @
http://soapbox.50free.net/forum/forum.php?catID=1&catname=All%20Things%20Political&forumID=1&forumname=GE%20Debate

Ok I've got a menu that along with other links has the main forum categories as well. When you expand the main category and mouseover a link you see some info regarding the forum.

Right now it works fine, but everytime someone requests a page the database goes through a whole series of queries to get PROBABLY the same information as the last page.

So my thought is:
would it be easier to dump the contents of the query into a php file (lets say nav.php) as variables and use that file instead of having to query the database every single time a page is loaded, by checking whether the file is older than 5 minutes and loading those variables stored in nav.php instead of querying the database.
Of course this means that I'm going to have to learn how to write this file and update it as well as making a few changes to the logic of the menu as it is.

So is it really worth it? What are the overheads on file checking in relation to querying the database?
At the moment I'm only testing it so it isn't under any load, but is it going to slow down the server much when a lot more people visit?

Cheers for any thoughts on this.

[HalfaBee]

If your page is not changing very often you are probably better off doing what you are suggesting. You could have a flag that indicates that the page has changed and recreate your flat file.
Your page basically changes with a new post, so this should not be too hard.

You should probably have a look at ob_start() and ob_get_contents() to make your life easy.

HalfaBee

[Weedpacket]

Depending on what else it's doing it needn't be a PHP file, but straight HTML. Have a script rewrite it whenever something it's displaying changes (when relevant parts of the database are being updated), and then just serve up that static page whenever it's requested.

You may want to check to see if the file exists first, when it's requested, and generate it if it's not. But if you can be sure of its existence, then you could link directly to the static HTML page and PHP need never be involved at all.

Again, though, this assumes that gathering the content to display on the page is all PHP does on the page.