Retrieving Data in .txt files vs MySQL Databases

mmcdermo

Hello,
I'm constructing a CMS that needs to be optimized to use minimal system resources and deal with heavy traffic. I use caching whenever possible, but I'm not sure what would be least taxing on system resources as far as loading some module configuration settings when I have to.

The two options that stick out in my mind are storing the settings as something like XML in .txt files or using a MySQL database to hold the information. Most of the data being stored will be strings < 10 chars and boolean values.

If MySQL is the better choice for this, I'd also like to know the best format (MyISAM, Merge, InnoDB, BDB, Memory/heap, Cluster, Federated, Archive, CSV, Blackhole) to use for these tables [storing frequently accessed small strings and bool values].

Thanks for your time,
~Morgan McDermott.

morganmcdermott [@t] gmail [d0t] com

tomhath

What do you mean by "module configuration settings"? And how many values do you expect to store (dozens, hundreds, thousands)?

mmcdermo

The term 'module configuration settings' simply refers to settings for the modules running on this system. For instance, it might determine the time to wait in between caching (cachetime = 5). The number of these will probably range from an initial value of around 500 and grow into the thousands as more modules are added. Many of these values will need to be loaded every time a module is loaded, so my concern is the resources it takes to retrieve the settings.

Thanks for your time,
Morgan McDermott

mmcdermo

For anyone else wishing to know the answer to this question, I've come up with a test to determine how long reading some sample data would take. Correct me if I'm wrong, but using resources for less time equates to using less resources overall, so this does measure resource consumption to some extent.

The script I used to determine this can be viewed here:
http://jfcentral.org/testing/optimization/retrieval/time_test.php

It appears that reading 10k and 20k files multiple times is done faster straight from files than from a database. For this reason, I will be storing these values in files instead of the database.