[RESOLVED] calling up a file from the server

[OwenTheSamoan]

I am currently calling up a large text file from my server. There are thousands of requests for this file per minute. This may seem like a stupid question but I have tried two different ways of calling up this file. One way which uses fopen() , fgets(), and fclose() and the second way which is simply an include() statement. Which is the more efficient or proper way of calling up this file, or does it really make no difference?

$myFile = "directory/".$something.".txt";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'r');
$theData = fgets($fh);
fclose($fh);
echo $theData = stripslashes($theData);

or this way

include('directory/'.$something.'.txt');

[leatherback]

I'd say.. definitely include()

[Horizon88]

include() would be better than fopen() and related, but you may want to see if there's a way you can restructure your system to not require accessing a single huge file like that.

You could also be awesome and make a mount point to your RAM on the server and store the file there, so that any time it loads it's referencing active memory instead of the hard disk, but that could cause a problem, depending on how big the file gets and how much RAM you have.

[OwenTheSamoan]

thanks for the advice guys!