Seriously, should I write bad PHP code? [closed]

Answer 1

Of course you shouldn't write bad PHP code. But once you have something written bad, you may always use perfomance as an excuse :-)

Answer 2

If you look at wordpress php code, it intermingles php tags in between its html which leads to spaghetti in my mind.

Phpbb3 however is way better in that regard. For example it has a strict division between the php part, and the styles part, which are xhtml formatted files with {template} tags, parsed by a template engine. Which is much cleaner.

Answer 3

In 99% of the cases, you should better worry about code understandability. Write code easy to test, understand and mantain.

In those few cases where performance really is critical, scripting languages like PHP are not your best choice. There's a reason many base library functions in PHP are written in C, after all.

Answer 4

PHP's main strength is that it's quick and easy to get a working app. That strength comes from the opportunity to write loose (bad) code and have it still operate in a somewhat expected way.

If you are in a position to need to conserve a few CPU cycles, PHP is not what you should be using. When PHP web apps perform poorly, it is far more likely due to inefficient queries, not the speed of the code execution.

Answer 5

Those who will lecture you about code micro-optimization are generally the same ones which will have 50 SQL queries per page, taking up a total of 2 seconds, because they never heard about profiling. But their code is optimizized !!! (and slow as hell)

Fact : adding another webserver is not difficult. Replicating a database is. Optimizing webserver code can be a net loss if it adds load on the DB.

Note : 2-3 ms for simple pages (like a forum topic) including SQL is a good target for a PHP website. My old website used to do that.

Answer 6

You should see the responses to this question: Should a developer aim for readability or performance first?

To summarize the consensus: Unless you know for a fact (through testing/profiling) that your performance needs to be addressed in some specific area, readability is far more important.