Question

Which is faster in PHP:

echo file_get_contents('http://example.com/file.txt');

or

$file = file_get_contents('http://example.com/file.txt'); echo $file;

I am using server side includes (require('/var/www/menu.php');) for my menus etc but want to use this for certain things (eg on other domains)

Thanks

Answer 1

If you use this method hugely on everypage for very large files, then you would waste memory space by extra variables. so the better approach would be:

echo file_get_contents('http://example.com/file.txt');

It would be a better question to ask which function is faster file_get_contents() or fread()? Then the answer was if file is more than 1MB or 2MB then use file_get_contents() which can perform better.
You can see a benchmark here:

File Read Type          Average Execution Time            Type of File 
file_get_contents()        0.3730ms                          Small 
fread()                    0.1108ms                          Small 
file_get_contents()        0.012ms                           Large 
fread()                    0.019ms                           Large 

Large file was 2.3MB and the small one was about 3.0KB.
I ran both functions against small files 100,000 times and ran it again on large file just once.