PHP script size

Anon

does the size of PHP scripts matter? i have a 88K PHP script. will it be slow when i load it?

toma42

of course it will be slow to load....increasing the length of anything will always increase the time to run.

Do your own benchmarks to see if you need to care.

neuromancer

I have a few scripts close to this size (Database abstraction and other classes) that have no problems.

[deleted]

Neuromancer, 88k IS slower to load than 5k.
How fast they are to run depends on what's in the script.
I could make a clumsy 1k script that takes 20 seconds to run,
and a 1000k script that is one big swich and have it execute in 0.0002 seconds.

neuromancer

How much slower is it really? It will make it into the fs cache and on any descent machine should be parsed in no itme.

And your totally right, it does depend on whats in the script. One database call might cost you more time than all your scripts execute time.

[deleted]

How much slower...
Can be quite a bit. If you look at the speed of include() functions, you can be surprised how much time it can take.

Ofcourse, on an idle P3-500 it shouldn't make a noticable difference.
But on a busy P2-400 that's getting beaten by a large crowd of visitors, every ms counts.

neuromancer

All the machines I work with are faster than that, and from my testing database queries are usually the slowest part of page processing.

[deleted]

Ok, back to the point: smaller scripts load and parse faster than big ones.
Wether that is something to worry about depends on your server's speed and systemload.

How long your script takes to execute is totally irrelevant.
If you have a busy server, no matter how huge and fast it is, you don't want to spend a 50ms waiting for your script to be loaded and parsed, even if the script does a 5 second query.

Anon

page size does matter in abusy server.
split into smaller ones and include it as needed