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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T20:18:50+00:00

This first script gets called several times for each user via an AJAX request.

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This first script gets called several times for each user via an AJAX request. It calls another script on a different server to get the last line of a text file. It works fine, but I think there is a lot of room for improvement but I am not a very good PHP coder, so I am hoping with the help of the community I can optimize this for speed and efficiency:

AJAX POST Request made to this script

<?php session_start();
$fileName = $_POST['textFile'];
$result = file_get_contents($_SESSION['serverURL']."fileReader.php?textFile=$fileName");
echo $result;
?>

It makes a GET request to this external script which reads a text file

<?php
$fileName = $_GET['textFile'];
if (file_exists('text/'.$fileName.'.txt')) {
    $lines = file('text/'.$fileName.'.txt');
    echo $lines[sizeof($lines)-1];
}
else{
    echo 0;
}
?>

I would appreciate any help. I think there is more improvement that can be made in the first script. It makes an expensive function call (file_get_contents), well at least I think its expensive!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This script should limit the locations and file types that it’s going to return.

    Think of somebody trying this:

    http://www.yoursite.com/yourscript.php?textFile=../../../etc/passwd (or something similar)

    Try to find out where delays occur.. does the HTTP request take long, or is the file so large that reading it takes long.

    If the request is slow, try caching results locally.

    If the file is huge, then you could set up a cron job that extracts the last line of the file at regular intervals (or at every change), and save that to a file that your other script can access directly.

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