PHP caching required files

robgudgeon

Hi guys

I have a PHP5 script that gets called over 600,000 times a day; currently it includes 4 libraries, though not every function from each library is used for this script.

So I've written a modified version of the script, that includes definitions of all the required functions, so doesn't include any other files, as I assumed that it would be an overhead for PHP to have to look for, open, parse & syntax check each of the libraries, for each request, but now I'm not so sure - does PHP support any sort of caching for included files? Or perhaps it caches the whole script itself?

I can't find much on this on the web, anybody have any similar experience?

Rob

NogDog

If the script is truly getting run an average of almost 7 times per second and if the server has not yet ground to a halt, then I have to believe it's doing a lot of hardware/OS disk caching already.

robgudgeon

the 600,000 is split across 6 load-balanced servers, but these all generally happen during UK business hours, so we do have a very high throughput during peak hours.

the servers haven't ground to a halt but they are using a lot of RAM, which I'd like to lower, if poss.

bpat1434

You could look at using the [man]memcache[/man] functions/extension in php. Not sure if it would help or not though.

There's also APC caching which is a PECL extension [ linky ]

I think those are really the only two caching mechanisms, unless you want to start using your own cacher that runs once every 15 minutes to generate html pages for your site which Apache rewrites the URL for......