PHP and Page Weight

[Anon]

A basic question for the forum.
As PHP is server side scripting, does having PHP inserted into a HTML page effect the ability of a page to render much.
i.e.
I have some dropdown lists that I used and array to "populate" and I was wondering if that simply proceedure would render in the same time as building the select statement in using pure HTML?

[Anon]

The only difference is the negligable amount of time it takes to echo out the data.

If you only need to change the option values you can always just build it in normal html format and just embed the php tags. Like so:

<select name="choose">
<option selected value="0"><?php echo $choice_default ?></option>
<option value="1"><?php echo $choice1 ?></option>
<option value="2"><? php echo $choice2 ?></option>
<option value="3"><?php echo $choice3 ?></option>
</select>

Unless your server is either really slow or hugely burdened, you won't even notice the difference in pure html and embedded php.

[frymaster]

actually, if you use the built-in compression feature you can speed up download time pretty dramatically. More than compensates for the time zend spends parsing and running yr code.