What's quicker; including another file or querying a MySQL database in PHP?

Question

In PHP, which is quicker; using include(\'somefile.php\') or querying a MySQL database with a simple SELECT query to get the same information?

Answer 1

I recently had this issue. I had some data in mysql that I was querying on every page request. For my data set, it was faster to write a fixed record length file than to use MySQL.

There were a few different factors that made a file faster than MySQL for me:

1. File size was small -- under 100kb of text data
2. I was randomly picking and not searching -- indexes made no difference
3. Connection time -- opening the file and reading it in was faster than connecting to the database when the server load was high. This was especially true since the OS cached the file in memory

Bottom line was that I benchmarked it and compared results. For my workload, the file system was faster. I suspect if my data set ever grows, that will change. I'm going to be keeping an eye on performance and I'm ready to change how it works in the future.