.php files on the fly

[cdogmx]

Here's the deal.. I'm not really a beginner programmer, but I'm just now starting to get into the more technical side of php.

I own/run myownjournal.com an online blog site. Users can set custom settings for their journals and it's all stored in the database. The database is getting TONS of traffic, and I want to reduce it some. So here is my planning.

I want to create config files for each user storing their settings in there. So I could just include a file called user_settings.php in their journal.

To first create these files I would have to create them from nothing. I would pull the information they have in the database, and write it to a file, and save it on my server.

What would be the way to do this? It's my first time ever attempting anything like this and I'm kind of lost.

Any help would be great!

Thanks

[Anarchos]

I woudl be very weary going from a database implementation to a file one, because maintaining all of those files is not going to be fun. If you haven't done so already, I suggest you try to optimize your site first to reduce database traffic. Use persistant connections, add indexes, etc.

The other thing you could do is create a cache file in each user's directory that is recreated from the database every time the user updates the settings. But you keep the data in the database too so that you can easily regenerate the files if you want to change formats or anything. If you wanted to change something in the settings file and you didn't have a database backup, you'd have to do weird data parsing on each file to update them.

[Owen]

How about caching the generated pages? Take a look at the (gosh) PEAR module Cache::Lite. It's easy to use and you only need to add a couple of lines to speed things up. After all, who cares if their page is 5 minutes out of date?

Owen

[coo_t2]

I've been thinking of doing something like this one something I'm working on.
If I do it, I'll probably just have a configuration table in the DB that only has one row.
Then I'll just select the row from the DB, and write the values to a .php file.

Here's a real simple(untested) example:

<?php

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM config");
$row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);

$fp = fopen('/file/to/config.php', 'w');

fwrite($fp, '$CONFIG[\'var1\'] = '.$row['columnName1'].";\n");
fwrite($fp, '$CONFIG[\'var2\'] = '.$row['columnName2'].";\n");
fwrite($fp, '$CONFIG[\'var3\'] = '.$row['columnName3'].";\n");
fwrite($fp, '$CONFIG[\'var4\'] = '.$row['columnName4'].";\n");
fwrite($fp, '$CONFIG[\'var5\'] = '.$row['columnName5'].";\n");
fwrite($fp, '$CONFIG[\'var6\'] = '.$row['columnName6'].";\n");
fwrite($fp, '$CONFIG[\'var7\'] = '.$row['columnName7'].";\n");

/* 
Could also use DEFINE:

fwrite($fp, 'DEFINE(\'CONST_NAME\', '.$row['columnName'].")\n");

*/

fclose($fp);

?>

BUt if you're caching the output with something like Pear::Cache_Lite , I don't guess you really have to worry about it.

--ed

[sweatje]

If you do not want to cache the whole page for some reason, you might want to look at my PHP DataCache project which caches PHP variables to either a file or a database so that you can just retrieve the varaible later.

coo_t2's example might look something like:

$CONFIG = $datacache->GetCache('config'); 

Application configuration is actually one of the areas where I tend to use DataCache. Under an MVC framework, I create an action that will set the cache (called only when setting up the application or when you make configuration changes) and otherwise use a line similar to above.

HTH

[cdogmx]

Since this is my first "Big" website I never had a database be so populated before, thus I never had to use indexing.

I indexed a lot of my tables and WOW the difference is incredible!

Thanks for the help guys/gals