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

Answer 1

Write a couple 10 minute examples and run them in your profiler.

That will tell you which is faster to the millisecond.

If you don't have a profiler, post them here, and I will run them in my PHPEd profiler.

I suspect that much of the time difference, if any, comes from having to open the file that a class is stored in, but that would have to be tested too.

Then ask yourself if you care that much about a few milliseconds vs having to maintain spaghetti code - will any of your users ever notice?

Edit

The profiler won't simulate high traffic volumes, but it will tell you which method is faster for a single user, and which parts of the code are using how much time. Especially if you profile the operations being done repeatedly - say 1000 times each in a loop.

We can assume (though not always) that faster code used by a lot of people will be faster than slower code used by a lot of people.

Answer 2

Personally, while there may be overhead for a function call, if it means I write the code once (parameterized), and then use it in 85 places, I'm WAY further ahead because I can fix it in one place.

Scripting languages tend to give people the idea that "good enough" and "works" are the only criteria to consider when coding.

Answer 3

If you develop web applications with a MVC architectural pattern, you can greatly benefit from caching and serialization. You can cache views, or portions of it, and you can serialize models.

From experience, models often parse and generate most of the data that's being displayed. If you know a certain model won't be generating new data frequently, like a model that parses an RSS feed, you can just have it stuffed somewhere with all the parsed data and have it refreshed every once in a while.

Answer 4

If you're that worried about every bit on efficiency, then why on earth are you using a scripting language? You should be programming in a much faster language (insert your favorite compiled language here), probably resulting in more, and less readable code, but it'll run really fast, and you can still aim for best coding practices.

Seriously, if you're coding for running speed, you shouldn't be using PHP at all.