Php "compiler" class

[McGruff]

...the first time I did tests on speed of includes etc (after seeing a thread such as this) I was amazed at the time spent loading files compared to actually parsing them , I was unaware (though I always assumed) there was a penalty, but not to the extent that I found.

Do you have any results, code etc?

I'd really like to nail this down once and for all. My position is that the cost of a single include is of the order of tens of thousandths of a second (on a slow-ish machine). You'd have to have an awful lot of includes before that becomes an issue.

A simple if not very scientific test:

/*
    test includes
*/
function getmicrotime()
{
    list($usec, $sec) = explode(" ", microtime());
    return ((float)$usec + (float)$sec);
}
/*
    run this once to create some empty files for testing
*/
mkdir('c:/includes_test', 0755);
for($i=0; $i<50; $i++)
{
    $fp = fopen('c:/includes_test/file_' . $i . '.txt', 'wb');
    fclose($fp);
}
/*
    next, run this:
*/
$start = getMicroTime();
for($i=0; $i<50; $i++)
{
    include('c:/test/file_' . $i . '.txt');
}
echo round(getmicrotime() - $start, 6) . '<br />';
$start = getMicroTime();
include('c:/test/file_1.txt');
echo round(getmicrotime() - $start, 6); 

It seems that many regular's in the advanced PHP forum seem to have one solution & that is to simply throw more hardware at a given issue , nothing wrong with that of course , but also nothing wrong with some basic optimisation.

With good reason. The gains to be had from "optimising" php scripts tend not to be significant. Websites need to have a large amount of "headroom" to cope with max expected peak demand. If there really is a problem in the first place, gains of a few per cent from optimising scripts do not help. You need to upgrade the hardware.

[webhappy]

The gains are crucial on a shared hosting server

[McGruff]

Why?

[Aesthetic-Theory]

The gains are crucial on a shared hosting server

No access to modify hardware.

[McGruff]

But you can always improve hardware by upgrading your account or getting a better host.

If a site is struggling under peak demand small percentage speed increases (if you managed to get even that) would not really help.

[Widow Maker]

[webhappy]

McGruff, what is the downside to this process? Nothing really... just extra deployment effort. Now, if we can find some other minor things to marginally improve the code, we might be able to keep the current shared host (which we might do for lots of reason such as cost).

[xmitchx]

A new version was released of this allowing encoding of the freelock include... I just noticed this on the sf.net site.

[McGruff]

McGruff, what is the downside to this process? Nothing really... just extra deployment effort.

Yes.