At 12/23/2006 10:33 AM, Jean-Christophe Roux wrote:
Hello, I have this php script of 3,500 lines with a big switch that
is such that on each pass maybe 300 lines of codes are executed at
most. The current speed of the file is ok. I like to keep the file
like that because at each pass there is a check on the whole script
and it fails if there is a typo somewhere. Also, I like to have one
file instead of many files. But I am wondering if speed is not
severaly hurt. What are the general guidelines in terms of length of
script? Also, I am writing things like that: echo
'<table>'; echo '<tr>'; echo "<td>Content</td>"; echo
'</tr>'; echo '</table>'; I like it this way because the script
is visually very well aligned, with one action per line and that
makes things easier for me to read and understand. But, so many
echoes may be considered bad practice; maybe it impacts speed significantly.
Are you encountering a speed problem or just pondering this
theoretically? My guess is that ECHO 'TEXT'; is one of the fastest,
most optimized operations the PHP interpreter executes.
But you don't need to guess at it: time it. Check the server logs,
or output the current time at the beginning and end of script
execution. My guess is that the difference between the execution of
your script and one much smaller will lie in a scale of tens or
hundreds of milliseconds. Servers are bloody fast; that's their job.
In general I think it's smarter to spend your time making your script
easy to read and proofread for you, the human slow link in the
development chain, than it is to make it faster to run on a
machine. Machines will keep getting faster; you're not likely to.
That said, there are things you can do that make your script more
efficient to execute AND to maintain. Personally I favor separating
out the HTML into larger, pure chunks that can be proofread more
easily than when tags and attributes are atomized and strewn
throughout the logic.
Regards,
Paul
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