Efficiency: PHP/HTML mix or pure PHP?

Anon

I'm a hobbyist web developer, currently creating a site using PHP & MySQL. The code for this site is now about 50% PHP, the rest HTML.

I'm wondering whether there is any significant efficiency differences between using 100% PHP to generate complete HTML pages versus using mixed HTML & PHP, where the PHP fills in the blanks, so to speak.

I guess what I'm asking is whether there is any performance hit entering & exiting PHP context, that would cause something like this:

<?php php stuff here... ?>
<HTML STUFF> </HTML STUFF>
<? more php with maybe a loop
{
?>
<HTML STUFF IN LOOP></STUFF>
?>
more php code
} // end loop
?>

take more time than just doing it it 100% PHP:

<?php
code to do everthing above, including static HTML code
?>

Any thoughts on this issue? Also, comments on readability and maintainability of code are welcome.

-- dave

Anon

Look at the subj. 🙂

As it follows from my experience, printing or echoing the html takes a pretty more time then displaying the raw html code.
But I'm to lazy to use the construction u've exampled in yer post.

Waiting for your suggestion.

Luck.

Anon

Personally I always code my sites with only PHP. I don't know if there are any performance issues. But I can tell you that I find pages written completly in PHP are much easier to read/maintain than ones that mix PHP and HTML. The only difficult thing is if you want to have your outputted HTML look nice also then you have alot of formatting of your print statements to do.

My guess on the performace issue is that there won't be any significant issues. Since your page already has to go through the PHP processor, and I'm sure that print statements are optomized to run the fastest that they can.

Anon

Funny, I am just the opposite. I try to write as much html as html as I can. I guess I'm a minimalist coder, since the less code I have to look at the better, and adding all that extra code with prints and escaping is too much of a pain. I came across this problem with JSP as well, where a lot of programmers tend to put html into their beans/servlets. imo this defeats some of the purpose of using hypertext pre-processors.

Anon

It depends on the code that I'm writting. I prefer to let an HTML developer write all of the HTML into template files of some kind, and then I'll just call them in my program and replace what I need before outputting them to the browser.

I think it all falls down to how you percieve yourself. I consider myself a programmer and have worked as a programmer for many years before working on any code that uses a web browser as the client.

Anon

Quite likely. I started from the html side, so it doesnt bother me to look at html code as long as the formatting of the files are good. In all honesty the way you code it is probably specific to the needs of the project, but either way I'll back the notion to use includes for html templateing whenever possible.

Anon

I can't believe this post has been here for this long without a "real" answer....

Just for the record, after asking myself the same question a few months back, and reading this thread (among others), I did some benchmarking.

It is MUCH more efficient to code a mixture. If PHP doesn't need to process the code, let the web server just push the bits out. In my test cases it was up to 10x slower to let PHP spit out the whole thing, as opposed to jumping back and forth between HTML and PHP.

Another advantage to doing mixed code, at least in some cases, is that you can use an HTML editor like GoLive and actually do some formatting in "WYSIWYG". At least as much as an editor allows.

Anon

I'd like to comment that this is an important issue in ASP. This is because with ASP the script engine has to check which language to parse (in most cases, VBscript).
In ASP it is therefore better to define your language in the top of the page, but mode switching between HTML/ASP still slows performance (in my experience).

As I understand it, PHP is a scripting language on it's own, so it is better to parse as few code as possible for better performance.

MB wrote:

I can't believe this post has been here for this long without a "real" answer....

Just for the record, after asking myself the same question a few months back, and reading this thread (among others), I did some benchmarking.

Another advantage to doing mixed code, at least in some cases, is that you can use an HTML editor like GoLive and actually do some formatting in "WYSIWYG". At least as much as an editor allows.