Most efficient form submission??

[speedamp]

hi everybody, i am redeveloping a very old site for a client and they might eventually need to handle a 200,000 site submissions/day.

in the past i have used everything from frameworks to classes to straight linear forms, and i was wondering what everybody thinks is the MOST efficient to avoid any crashes?

note: there will be no uploads of any sort....simply text submissions (10-12 fields of data).

thanks,

-michael

[Desdinova]

what kind of crashes are you worried about exactly?

[speedamp]

mostly just wondering if that amount of traffic would cause any server slow-down issues.

cna't afford that, and wanted to get anybody's opinion on efficent form submission.

[Desdinova]

well since it might eventually need to handle 200k requests, you have plenty time to identify any issues before they might be occuring.

I would suggest writing clean and efficient code that does no things it shouldn't be doing.

Additionally you might want to think about the form validation. Do you want to check the incoming data for proper formatting? if that's less important, you might want to swap that checking to javascript, which is less secure but calculates in the user browser (free resources for you! 😉

do note that users can quite easily circumvent javascript. The question is do they want to, and who will they be hurting if they do. If they hurt no-one or only themselves, then why not go for javascript validation.

What happens with the form? Simply storage in a DB? I'd say keep the query clean, the table structure logical (probably a single table) and don't do stuff you don't need to do.

Since it's an old site, I doubt optimizing this stuff will save you from hitting the first bottleneck (which I suspect will be found in old and possibly less optimized code).

[speedamp]

yes, this is a simple 12 field text only form.

i'll do very simple JS validation.

is a standard linear POST form any less efficient than a class based solution?

[Desdinova]

POST has nothing to do with classes really. You can however process POST data from within a class, if that's what you mean.

In terms of processing it might or might not cost you a wee bit more CPU or MEM, but honestly that's neglectable for any conveniences gained.

If you want to simply put $_POST data in the db, I'd suggest to post the form to a specific file that handles receiving the POST data. in this file you would do only what is required, instantiating the database connection, any verifications you might be willing to do, then run the insert query. After that either do a header('location: target_url_here'); to redirect the user to a different page, or echo a result page.

[speedamp]

great idea to separate the logic.....one page to process, one for validation, and then a final DB processing page.

next question: anybody have any thoughts on the most efficient DB connection protocol? pconnect? singleton??

thanks!

-michael