Server load Q: html vs php

gecko498

I'm doing some work on an existing site, with many incoming links to .php files on the site. Some of these pages are not dynamic, and therefor could be .html files.

How big a difference does it make in terms of server load if a page is processed by php (with no php tags in the document) versus a page an html page?

Ie, is it worth changing these pages to .html and using 301 redirects to save on processor time? Or is the gain so small that I'm better off leaving them with the php extensions?

Note: It's a very high traffic site.

Installer

The server will send a file with a php extension through the php module whether there's actual php in it or not. I don't know what the savings would be, but there's bound to be some by giving non-php files a non-php extension. If it's .html, then make sure that extension isn't configured as a php file in the server configuration.

bradgrafelman

As Installer said, there are probably some resources that are being saved when not using PHP extensions versus PHP extensions without any PHP code.

The question is, should we care? Probalby not.

A PHP script I created which scans a 114KB data file using Perl's REGEXP syntax (3 different intricate REGEXP's), some parsing, some date/number formatting, and outputting, takes only 0.0085471 seconds to load.

So, if a PHP script using all of that can load in 0.0085471 seconds, a PHP script which does nothing but transparently pass the data on to the output stream probably takes 0.0000001 seconds to parse.

So, if you use a .php extension with NO PHP code, then yeah, you're probably losing 0.0000001 seconds! 😉

gecko498

0.0000001 seconds! I can't afford to waste that! 😉

Thanks guys, pretty much what I figured...I'll just leave them and save myself having to rebuild incoming links.

Cheers

ownedman

also php parser only parses when it finds either the <?, <?php, <?PHP, or <?=

and stops at ?> if you only got html in it it would quickly scan and output it as html lol

Edit:

or the asp style tags <% etc. %>