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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T17:20:14+00:00

I am designing a web application which will be doing three things: 1) store

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I am designing a web application which will be doing three things:

1) store some data

2) make user available to view these data

3) from time to time add/remove/change some data

Looks pretty simple, but I would like to minimase usage of server resources by avoiding MySQL and PHP. My main goal is to deliver HTML file for user – posts1.html (posts2.html, posts3.html… (where 1,2,3 are numbers of pages of data)).

Normally, I would create posts.php file, which would send query to database, but my data are changing only three-five times a day, so it would be a huge waste.

Instead, I thought about caching these data, what would spare a lot of server resources, but in this situation there would be some of PHP code involved.

My another idea is to create script that would be creating all HTML files after every change in database and then replace the old ones with them. But what if someone requests page that is replacing right now? It may cause errors, user can get the uncompleted file etc.

However, there is one solution – I could store created HTML files in two directories (A and B) and using .htaccess do something like this (pseudocode):

if ( (HOURS)%2 == 0 )
   /postsX.html -> /A/postsX.html
else
   /postsX.html -> /B/postsX.html

It would give me enough time to upgrade all files.

I would love to hear what do you think about it and what would you do?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If you dont want to use a full blown MySQL server, use SQLite. It’s part of PHP and very lightweight. Then add caching where appropriate. Your other approaches sound like a waste of time to me. Too much effort for too little gain. SQLite and caching is tried and tested.

    Besides, you should not worry about waste of resources unless you are running short on them. Your application doesnt sound like it needs scaling at this point. So build the simplest thing that will work.

    If you have to have that static pages approach, then put all those files into a symlinked folder. Create a script that generates the static pages into a new folder (either via cron or manual trigger) and then changes the symlink from the old folder to the new folder. This way you don’t have to worry about people hitting your site while its generating content.

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