PHP & HTML (Dynamic vs. Static Content)

[jaylee]

1. When I'm serving static content, what would be the efficiency differences between using PHP & HTML?

2. Can I embed segments of PHP code into a .html document for perform certain tasks?

3. If "2" is yes, in what sequences are files going to be parsed?

[kparker]

(1) Not huge, but definitely measurable. Try some testing yourself, on your actual server, and see what you think of the results.

(2) Yes, but it's not a good idea--the only way the webserver has to know whether or not to run the file through the PHP parser is by extension. So if you want PHP code to run in html files, it will have to run every single html file through php. This isn't a huge overhead if there isn't in fact any php code in the file (see #1 above) but still you would probably like to avoid it. The only reason for doing this, rather than just naming php files .PHP and plain html files .HTML is if you have some external constraints on what certain pages are named (e.g. lots of external references to www.yoursite.com/specific_page.html rather than just to www.yoursite.com)

[jaylee]

In concern about efficiency for huge traffic, would it be good for doing this:

http://www.mysite.com/main.php?page.html

Where main.php perform its functions for some database related tasks and then display the static content page.html

Any better suggestion?

[kparker]

I don't see any efficiency difference here: what you're proposing seems more like a way to do something database-related (e.g. logging) w/o having to modify every html page. If that's what you're after, and high traffic really is a concern, you ought to think long and hard about why you can't just use the webserver logs--after all, they're getting created anyway, aren't they?

[jaylee]

What I'm trying to do is more of a real-time project. I would like to show the updated result every 1 - 5 minutes to anoter script via queries.

If I'm going to analyze the webserver logs every 5 minutes, do I have to read through the whole access_log (hundreds of MBs) and analyze each line? Is it going to be even less efficient?

Or is there any other alternative ways for faster log analysis?

[kparker]

Interesting needs. Perhaps you can do a log_rotate every five minutes? (Just off the top of my head, I have no idea if that is a workable method or not)

[jaylee]

I've a new posting with detail of my project requirement at http://www.phpbuilder.com/forum/read.php3?num=2&id=145372&thread=145372

Let me know if you have any other idea in mind. Thank you for your help 🙂

[cordex]

http://www.mysite.com/main.php?page.html

Jay, you might want to consider how you are going to use this.

I know what you're saying but it would have to be http://www.mysite.com/main.php?var=page.html where var is the variable name. Regardless, allowing a user to define what file they wish to include can be dangerous because at that point, PHP doesn't do authentication to see if the user has valid access to the file. You might want to use your database to store a reference id for each page and call the page like:
http://www.mysite.com/main.php?var=pageid
then check in your database to see where you need to go to find 'pageid'.

[jaylee]

Hi Ben,

Thank you for your suggestion. I'll keep that in mind when doing the actual implementation.