What is big?

[Anon]

Hello Guys

I have all my functions in a shared file. The file size is 6.8KB. Is that too much for parsing? Is there any restriction in including files?

OOzy

[Anon]

I\'d like to know this too. I have a global functions file that is getting to be about 33k in size. Thats a lot of functions.

Would it be better to put the functions in MySQL maybe? I wonder how that might be done. The idea just popped in my head while typing this.

[kparker]

Well, first of all, if it's a frequently-used file, the data will "live" in your server's filesystem cache anyway, so although there is still the overhead of asking the OS to read the file, at least it won't entail a lot of disk activity.

Secondly, anything you do with mysql is going to be much slower in terms in raw access speed than a file in the filesystem. A dbms solves different problems--how to quickly locate a few records out of thousands, how to update a record independently of the rest of the data, how to coordinate multiple users all updating the same data, etc.

Finally, the real answer is, "It depends". If you can't measure the results, you're just shooting in the dark.

[[deleted]]

The bigger the files, the longer it takes for PHP to load it and get it ready to run.
How long your script takes to run depends on how many things you want it to do.
I have scripts that are well over 140kb, and they still execute in less than a millisecond because they hardly do anything. 🙂 there's just a few case statements to handle different events. The actual work can be summarized in less than 100 lines per run.

Use microtime() to measure how long the whole thing takes. And I do mean the WHOLE thing. If the whole script takes 50ms to complete, and 10ms is loading the file, no problemo. If the script takes 300ms, and 250ms is loading the file... ouch...

[Anon]

How does microtime() work, where does it report results?

[[deleted]]

Ehm.. you may want to check the PHP manual once in a while. :-)

I quickly copied this from this very forum:

$starttime = microtime();

do your stuff

$endtime = microtime();

// Microtime output is: "microseconds actualseconds"
$parts_of_starttime = explode(" ", $starttime);
$starttime = $parts_of_starttime[0] + $parts_of_starttime[1];

$parts_of_endtime = explode(" ", $endtime);
$endtime = $parts_of_endtime[0] + $parts_of_endtime[1];

$time_taken = $endtime - $starttime;

[kparker]

Wouldn't you want to multiply the whole-seconds parts by 1 million, so the results are in terms of microseconds?

[[deleted]]

No, because the output of mircotime is ala

"0.47586200 989092388", which is "(fraction)[space](epoch seconds)"

so you can just add the two up.

[kparker]

Oh, I forgot the micro part was fractional seconds. Good grief, I used it just last week. Anyway, nevermind.

[[deleted]]

giggle working too hard eh?