I currently have 2000 records in a postgresql database being updated every minute that are filtered with a SQL statement. Upto 1000 different filter combinations can exist and approx 500 different filters can be called every minute. At the moment http responses are cached for 59 seconds to ease server load and database calls. However im considering caching the whole db table in memcached and doing the filtering in php. 2000 rows isnt alot but the response time for getting data from memory vs the db would be alot faster.
Would the php processing time outweigh the database response time for sql filtering for this number of rows? The table shouldnt grow anymore than 3000 rows in the foreseeable future.
As with any question relating to
is x faster than y, the only real answer is to benchmark it for yourself. However, if the database is properly indexed for the queries you need to perform, it is likely to be quite a bit faster at filtering result sets than most any PHP code you could write.The RDBMS is on the other hand, is already designed and optimized for locating, filtering, and ordering rows.