MySQL - PHP performance question

[Anon]

New to both PHP & MySQL but learning quickly. Here's my hypothetical scenario: Medium to large web site with gobs of traffic. Almost all pages have the same standard navigation menus and footers.

Is it quicker for PHP to grab (query) the HTML code out of a MySQL DB and send the compiled pages to the webserver or is it quicker to use the INCLUDE() command, say...

<? include(navmenu.txt); ?>

It probably wouldn't make a difference for a small site but what about a site with hundreds of thousands or millions of hits a day?

It also appears that the REQUIRE(), FOPEN() and READFILE() would accomplish the same thing as the INCLUDE(). Is that so or are their fundamental differences I should be aware of? How about performance using these commands vs MySQL queries?

[[deleted]]

A database query is allways slower than include or require.
Simply because a database needs a connection, it needs it's own server process that you need to send a query to. The query needs to be checked, analyzed, optimized and executed. Then the data must be retreived, sent to PHP, read from the resultset and printed to the screen.
That's a lot more work then opening a file, reading it, closing it, and printing the data.

Indeed, include require fopen and readfile can all do the same thing.
The difference is that include and require will parse the included script, so you can do PHP things in the included files too, where readfile and fopen will simply print the content of the included file.
And require will kill your script if the included file does not exist.

One general rule of thumb is: use tools for that which they were created for.
Databases were created to search in tons of data, to generate lists of results and manipulate them.
Filesystems were made to store files of any size and allow fast and easy access to the data in those files.
If you don't need to search the data, don't put it in a database.

[Anon]

Thanks Vincent for the information and advice!