Question

sorry for poor topic name, i could not think for any thing better 😉

i am working on a news broadcast web site project, and the stake holder asked me to create a unique html file for each article and save it on disk instead of using a dbms like mysql , so the users can access the file directly and no computing will be needed so there wont be any bottle neck in that case.
and i did so.
and my question is , is this(what he asked me) a good and popular practice in programming?
what are the pros and cons?

thank you all and sorry for my poor English writing 😛

Answer 1

If you got a template and can generate these pages automatically, it can be a good practise. Like you say, it prevents your server from having to generate the page. It only needs to put through the plain page.

And if you need to change the layout, or need to edit an article, you can just regenerate the page.

It is quite common, although lots of pages always have some dynamic content, like a date, user info or other session or time specific data. In this case you cannot cache the entire page. Of course you can combine both. Have dynamic index pages and front page, and only cache the actual articles themselves. But I read in your question that that is what you’ve done now.

Pros:

• Faster retrieval of pages
• Less load on your webserver
• Less load on your database server

Cons:

• Need to do some extra work to update the cache when an article is modified
• Cannot have any dynamic content in the page
• There probably isn’t a problem at all. Most webservers are able to server large amounts of dynamic pages (premature optimization is the root of all evil).
• There are other ways to speed things up, that don’t have the above cons. You could cache query results in Memcache and/or use APC cache to speed up your PHP code and decrease disk I/O.

But there are web hosting companies dedicated entirely onto serving static content. That static content can be server from in-memory too, making it even faster than APC cached dynamic content, so if you really really really need the performance, yes, this is the way to go. But I seriously doubt you do.