Question

What effect will the server load have if there are a lot of items that are getting parsed in an XML file via PHP, say 1 million items and what is the difference between parsing 10 items and 1million items. Is there a solution to cache the html generated?

Answer 1

The difference between parsing 10 and 1 million is easy – 100,000 times.

The impact depends on the size of the files, how you’re loading them, how you’re parsing them, etc.

You can easily time how long it takes to execute a script:

$start = time();
//...your script
echo "Time taken: ".(time()-$start)." seconds";

Run your script with, say, 100 files. If it takes 5 seconds, you can assume it’ll take roughly 50,000 seconds to run with a million files.

Really need more detail to be able to answer with any more certainty.