We have an old (written in CakePHP 1.1!) application that has started groaning under the weight of its responsibilities, so we’re giving it an overhaul with the help of some consultants.
One of the “quick wins” that they have identified: some pages are experiencing not-insignificant slowdown due to multiple calls to $html->url. As for whatever reason we’re not currently using routing, and even in the future the necessity for reverse routing isn’t likely to come into play, use of $html->url could just be creating overhead for the sake of it here. Some questions that arise in my mind in any case:
(1) Is it better to do things “the Cake way” where possible even if this is slower? Are there other advantages to using the HTML helper for links that might not have been considered.
(2) We are planning to upgrade to a much more up-to-date version of Cake, possibly all the way to 2.0, at some point. Is it possible that the current slowness of using the HTML helper is more to do with being in Cake 1.1 than an inherently bad design decision?
Just interested in people’s opinions generally on this subject: is it definitely right for us to strip out laborious uses of the HTML helper or not?
An upgrade to CakePHP 2.0 will definitely yield a speed improvement. Beware however, the upgrade path from 1.1 to 2.0 is not smooth. Expect to do a lot of manual editing.
As to the multiple calls to $html->ur(), you might find this useful:
http://debuggable.com/posts/how-to-save-half-a-second-on-every-request-of-your-cakephp-app:49a69610-8648-4d65-815d-754c4834cda3