I’m developing a wiki-like web app and each page has 5, individually-editable content parts to it.
I have a simple caching class that saves the rendered parts to a file.
If a part of the page has not changed, it loads the cache, if it has, it renders it and then saves it to cache.
Because the page has 5 parts that are separately editable, I am saving each part as its own file, so when an edit is made, only that part is re-rendered and cached.
But, this also mean that every load, 5 files are read and included in the code.
Is it better to do it this way, or save the entire page in a single cache file?
That depends on multiple factors, I guess…
I would optimize for the viewing of the site, because it happens a lot more frequent than making a change, I suppose. So I would cache it in one file.
The only way to know, is to measure it… with the microtime()-function, you can compare the script executiontime on different points and during different tryouts…