Erik, thaks for the reply. I conducted a simple/rough benchmark to which is more expensive. I tested on a Intel PIII (450MHz 384MB ram) box running Win Xp, Apache 1.3.26 and PHP 4.2.1, and mysql 3.23.49 and freeBSD of similar stats (1000MHz, 1G ram). I used the adodb database abstraction layer to make my connections (which adds extra weigt to the db initialization and queries, but this is the default method I use to access databases) to a db, and then queried a smallish db with a "select * from table." I then benchmarked a file read of a similarily sized file.
Win DB results average (not including the include of the adodb class): time index ex time % Start 1024676092.32095600 - 0.00% init db 1024676092.34258300 0.021627 75.19% query 1024676092.34942600 0.006843 23.79% close 1024676092.34963100 0.000205 0.71% Stop 1024676092.34971900 0.000088 0.31% total - 0.028763 100.00% Win Filesystem results average: time index ex time % Start 1024676092.35610400 - 0.00% file open 1024676092.35685300 0.000749 28.59% read 1024676092.35846200 0.001609 61.41% close 1024676092.35863700 0.000175 6.68% Stop 1024676092.35872400 0.000087 3.32% total - 0.002620 100.00% freeBSD DB results average (not including the include of the adodb class): time index ex time % Start 1024677559.22131200 - 0.00% init adodb 1024677559.22266700 0.001355 75.66% query 1024677559.22303400 0.000367 20.49% close 1024677559.22307900 0.000045 2.51% Stop 1024677559.22310300 0.000024 1.34% total - 0.001791 100.00% freeBSD Filesystem results average: time index ex time % Start 1024677559.22374400 - 0.00% file open 1024677559.22380700 0.000063 11.23% read 1024677559.22423200 0.000425 75.76% close 1024677559.22428200 0.000050 8.91% Stop 1024677559.22430500 0.000023 4.10% total - 0.000561 100.00% On the win box, file system access was 11 times faster, while on the freeBSD box, file system access was 3 times faster. The include of the adodb class is not benchmarked, as part of this test, that that adds extra overhead as well. I suppose that filesystem access is faster. Michael "Erik Price" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message [EMAIL PROTECTED]">news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]... > > On Friday, June 21, 2002, at 11:19 AM, mike wrote: > > > I was reading somewhere (can't remember where) that connecting to a db > > is a > > pretty costly transaction. DB queries aside, does anyone know of any > > benchmarks that demonstrate file access vs. db connections? > > > > Similarily, while DB queries offer alot of power, would it be cheaper > > (faster) to drop simple information that does not require heavy queries > > into > > a file and access it through the file system? > > I don't have any stats, but I think it really depends. If you're > executing a really complex query that uses like six JOINs and eight > WHERE clauses, then the bottleneck is the DB and not the DB access > itself, so it would probably be quicker to have this information ready > in a file (or even better, cached in memory somehow, though I have no > experience doing this). But I believe that with a simpler DB query, a > DB access is faster than a file read. > > Here's something that turned up in Google... > http://phplens.com/lens/php-book/optimizing-debugging-php.php > > > Erik > > > > > ---- > > Erik Price > Web Developer Temp > Media Lab, H.H. Brown > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php