Bandwidth/Data Retrieval

[The_PHP_Newb]

I have a file that is called from 1,000s of sites per day. It's about 5K in size and bandwidth is getting out of control (each time a site calls this file from my server, it costs me bandwidth).

Question A):
Rather than have all the data in that file, can I put the data into a database entry and call it from the file?

Question 😎:
Will this reduce my bandwidth as the file will hopefully be more like 50 bytes vs. 5,000 or will it still count all the data being pulled from the database?

This is what I'd like to do:
<?
$getdata = mysql_query.......
$whatever = mysql_fetch_array($getdata);
echo $whatever[data];
?>

Our file is called from other sites using <ilayer><iframe>.

Will this work or is this just a stupid question altogether?

[CMallette]

Well, basically even if the script itself is very small it all depends on what it outputs. If the script outputs the same file as what your are sending right now, you won't see any difference.

[The_PHP_Newb]

The current file only updates entries in our database, it doesn't send anything out to the member browsers.

[CMallette]

How is it sending 5K per request, if it does not send anything out to the browser?

[The_PHP_Newb]

Because the 5K file is being called from their site. The entire file is being loaded each time.

[Weedpacket]

But the only bandwidth being consumed is in (a) the request the client makes to the server, and (b) the response the server makes back to the client. You've said that (b) is effectively zero, so are we to understand that these thousands of clients are each sending 5kB requests to the server?

I think you'll need to be a little more explicit about the setup you've got there.