sending images question

dumdumdaniel

howdie,

i was wondering. i'm developing a backend that will be under some intense load in the long run.

all the data is handled is such a way that the viewer cannot see anything unless it is sent from the main 'core', which is completely unaccessable except by the only file they can access (if that makes sense).

in regards to images, this can cause issues! all page templates are stored out of reach of the client and are sent via the php coding. there is no problem with this. using a template engine and a simple 'image.php?filename=blah.gif' it's easy to make all image references in the html output to point this image getter thingy... yuh!

i was wondering (depending on what server software it is being run on [IIS, APache etc]) whether it would be more efficient at high load to use several image.php files or not........

ie, would it be faster to have image1.php image2.php image3.php so that the server is requesting 3 different files instead of sending 3 requests to one file...... if that makes sense....

ta!

commandonz

First off, i'm an experienced Java developer, but new enough to PHP, so take my answer in that context.

Now have a read of this post I just made. Storing images on the file system should be fine in most cases, just protect the generated pages behind whatever system you like.

As for having seperate image1.php, image2.php, the answer is almost certianly no, if you must go that way. Just use one image.php file, that means it's only compiled once. PHP should be threaded so it can run as many threads over that scripts as it likes. Plus having more than one script is a maintenance issue, which is more important than you might think.

Hope that helps 🙂

dumdumdaniel

yup that helps!

cool! thanks for your input! it's appreciated.

yuh, everything is pretty heavily protected!

i've looked into php's threading and it should be good, just like you said!

it's a bit difficult to test a script for load and stuff when its on a server with only you making the requests! =]

thankyou again!

dan

commandonz

No worries - but look into load testing tools. There's bound to be some free ones around.