How many lines of PHP code is too many for one file?

Question

I\'m creating a PHP file that does 2 mysql database calls and the rest of the script is if statements for things like file_exists and other simple variables. I have about 2000

Answer 1

Line count is not a good indicator of performance. Make sure that your code is organized efficiently, divided into logical classes or blocks and that you don't combine unrelated code into single modules.

One of the problems with a language like PHP is that, barring some creative caching, every line of every included file must be tokenized, zipped through a parse tree and turned into meaningful instructions every time the hosting page is requested. Compiled platforms like .NET and Java do not suffer from this performance killer.

Also, since one of the other posters mentioned MVC as a way to keep files short: good code organization is a function of experience and common sense and is in no way tied to any particular pattern or architecture. MVC is interesting, but isn't a solution to this problem.