Question

If i had a mysql db with 7000 records in it and i had to display all 7000 on my webpage. Are there any tips and tricks to speed the process up (the browser practically crashes before showing all the records) i know i should query it to reduce the number of records selected but i actually need to display 7000…

Answer 1

Turn on output buffering : http://php.net/manual/en/function.ob-start.php

<?php

ob_start(); 

// do work...

ob_end_flush();

?>

EDIT

The following php fetches 10K products and outputs them as a table with no problems in 0.014 seconds.

<?php

ob_start(); 

$conn = new Mysqli("localhost", "vldb_dbo", "pass", "vldb_db");

$startTime = microtime(true);

$result = $conn->query(sprintf("call list_products(%d)", 10000));

echo "<table border='1'>";

while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()){
 echo sprintf("<tr><td>%s</td><td>%s</td></tr>", $row["prod_id"], $row["name"]);
}

echo "</table>";

echo sprintf("<br/>Page generated in %s secs",number_format(microtime(true) - $startTime, 6, ".", ""));

$result->close();   
$conn->close();

ob_end_flush();

?>

SQL Script

drop procedure if exists list_products;
delimiter #

create procedure list_products
(
in p_prod_id int unsigned
)
begin
    select * from product where prod_id between 1 and p_prod_id;
end #

delimiter ;

Works fine with 50K records too except runtime dives – Page generated in 0.112902 secs

EDIT2

http://phplens.com/lens/php-book/optimizing-debugging-php.php

An excerpt from the above link:

An alternate way of speeding the above
code would be to use output buffering.
This will accumulate the output string
internally, and send the output in one
shot at the end of the script. This
reduces networking overhead
substantially at the cost of more
memory and an increase in latency. In
some of my code consisting entirely of
echo statements, performance
improvements of 15% have been
observed.