Question

For our online game, we have written tons of PHP classes and functions grouped by theme in files and then folders. In the end, we have now all our backend code (logic & DB access layers) in a set of files that we call libs and we include our libs in our GUI (web pages, presentation layer) using include_once(‘pathtolib/file.inc’).

The problem is that we have been lazy with inclusions and most include statements are made inside our libs file resulting that from each webpage, each time we include any libs file, we actually load the entire libs, file by file.

This has a significant impact on the performance. Therefore What would be the best solution ?

• Remove all include statements from the libs file and only call the necessary one from the web pages ?
• Do something else ?

Server uses a classic LAMP stack (PHP5).

EDIT: We have a mix of simple functions (legacy reason and the majority of the code) and classes. So autoload will not be enough.

Answer 1

• Manage all includes manually, only where needed
• Set your include_path to only where it has to be, the default is something like .:/usr/lib/pear/:/usr/lib/php, point it only at where it has to be, php.net/set_include_path
• Don’t use autoload, it’s slow and makes APC and equivalent caches jobs a lot harder
• You can turn off the ‘stat’-operation in APC, but then you have to clear the cache manually every time you update the files