Question

My AJAX search program keeps asking PHP for results of a particular search term. The start of the PHP script reads thru a MySQL DB and initializes, so if the PHP keeps restarting, it will have to read the DB millions of times. If I can keep it alive and let multiple silly AJAX requests be served by a single running PHP script instance I’m sure performance would improve.

How do you do this typically? Use a service? Can this be done with services?

Answer 1

How about storing the db results in a session variable? You’d check first if the keyword is not in the session (sessions allow to transport variable values between page refreshes), and if not, do a db query.

To store it:

$_SESSION['storedQueries']['keyword']= 'its definition, from the database';

To look for it:

  $index=  array_search('keyword',array_keys($_SESSION['storedQueries']));
  $result = ($index) ? $_SESSION['storedQueries'][$index] : 'nothing found, you should do a db query';

The ajax part is pretty easy if you use a javascript library, such as jquery:

$('#resultZone').load('find.php',{keyword: $('input.search').val() });