faster fopen or file_get_contents?

Question

i am running multiple websites with high traffic , as a requirement , all images are downloaded via image.php?id=IMAGE_ID_HERE . If you ever done that before , you

Answer 1

Why dont you cache the image content with apc ?

if(!apc_exists('img_'.$id)){
    apc_store('img_'.$id,file_get_content(...));
}

echo apc_fetch('img_'.$id);

this way image content will not be read from your disk more than once.

Answer 2

fopen and file_get_contents are nearly equivalent

to speed up with consistence the page load you can use

http://www.php.net/fpassthru

or, even better

http://www.php.net/readfile

with those functions, content of file is printed directly, byte per byte

as opposed to file_get_contents, for example, where you store the whole data inside a variable

$var = file_get_contents();

so, to make these work correctly you will need to disable output buffering (otherwise it would make readfile() pointless) in the page that serves the images

hope this helps!