Question

I am building an App in CodeIgniter. I have a controller API and then It has got around 300 functions.

I wonder if this is an issue in terms of performance. Any body can help ?

Answer 1

A very large controller would take longer to parse. Every time any method from your Controller is called, the controller class is invoked and instantiated and thus the entire controller has to be parsed (Better put, the fat controller needs to be parsed in its entirity once per request). Parsing a larger file will take longer, however the additional time will be very minute.

This is the only disadvantage I can think of in terms of performance.

There are, of course, a host of maintenance issues.

Explanation of ‘Class in instantiated every time you call one of its methods’

URL routing in CodeIgniter works this way:

example.com/controller/method

So when you visit

example.com/user/create

create is a function in the controller class user. To call the create method,user class has to first be instantiated, and then the method is called.

If your controller class has 200 other functions, they need to be parsed as well.

If you now point your browser to

example.com/user/delete

The previous instantiation of the class no longer exists. The entire class needs to be parsed again.