Question

I have a PHP/MySQL based web application that has internationalization support by way of a MySQL table called language_strings with the string_id, lang_id and lang_text fields.

I call the following function when I need to display a string in the selected language:

public function get_lang_string($string_id, $lang_id)
    {
        $db = new Database();
        $sql = sprintf('SELECT lang_string FROM language_strings WHERE lang_id IN (1, %s) AND string_id=%s ORDER BY lang_id DESC LIMIT 1', $db->escape($lang_id, 'int'), $db->escape($string_id, 'int'));
        $row = $db->query_first($sql);

        return $row['lang_string'];
    }

This works perfectly but I am concerned that there could be a lot of database queries going on. e.g. the main menu has 5 link texts, all of which call this function.

Would it be faster to load the entire language_strings table results for the selected lang_id into a PHP array and then call that from the function? Potentially that would be a huge array with much of it redundant but clearly it would be one database query per page load instead of lots.

Can anyone suggest another more efficient way of doing this?

Answer 1

OK – I did some benchmarking and was surprised to find that putting things into an array rather than using individual queries was, on average, 10-15% SLOWER.

I think the reason for this was because, even if I filtered out the “uncommon” elements, inevitably there was always going to be unused elements as a matter of course.

With the individual queries I am only ever getting out what I need and as the queries are so simple I think I am best sticking with that method.

This works for me, of course in other situations where the individual queries are more complex, I think the method of storing common data in an array would turn out to be more efficient.