file_exists() is too slow in PHP. Can anyone suggest a faster alternative?

Question

When displaying images on our website, we check if the file exists with a call to file_exists(). We fall back to a dummy image if the file was missing.

Howe

Answer 1

I find 1/2ms per call very, very affordable. I don't think there are much faster alternatives around, as the file functions are very close to the lower layers that handle file operations.

You could however write a wrapper to file_exists() that caches results into a memcache or similar facility. That should reduce the time to next to nothing in everyday use.