Question

I’m working on very big project – quiz system (examination). And have a few questions about it. First of all,which is the best solution:

1) Getting all pages contents from MySQL database and creating php cache

or

2) Saving page contents in static files?

Which solution will work faster that other one?

Answer 1

Baseline-html

Baseline-html is always faster than PHP because PHP needs to be invoked.

The results follow (all are at 10 concurrent users, averaged over 5 one-minute runs):

ab                       |      rel |      avg |
------------------------ | -------- | -------- |
baseline-html            |   1.2660 |  3581.54 |
baseline-php             |   1.0000 |  2829.11 |

http_load                |      rel |      avg |
------------------------ | -------- | -------- |
baseline-html            |   1.2718 |  4036.24 |
baseline-php             |   1.0000 |  3173.56 |

siege                    |      rel |      avg |
------------------------ | -------- | -------- |
baseline-html            |   1.2139 |  5060.25 |
baseline-php             |   1.0000 |  4168.76 |

But luckily PHP is pretty fast and almost does not have any performance impact when you write optimized PHP code. PHP is a dynamic language so less is more.

APC

Furthermore if you plan on working on a big site the first thing you should install is APC. From the WIKI page:

Most PHP accelerators work by caching the compiled bytecode of PHP
scripts to avoid the overhead of parsing and compiling source code on
each request (some or all of which may never even be executed). To
further improve performance, the cached code is stored in shared
memory and directly executed from there, minimizing the amount of slow
disk reads and memory copying at runtime.

In-memory Database

To further speed up any big site you really need to use in-memory database like Redis(I like this) or Memcached. All big sites use one of these. For example Facebook, Twitter could not run without Memcached(Redis would also work but they went with Memcached). This will also really speed up your website.