Re: [PHP] Whats more efficient? (Conclusion)

Hey all,

Thanks for clearing up my little doubt, I wanted to know if there was a
major differience.

John, thanks for the reply and I know it makes sense (like all your replies)
but I just kind of got my feet wet with php
and getting to the interesting stuff, learning while i go along of course.

I dont think I can take trying to learn a who new templating
language/package while doing this because I hear
some of them (eg smarty) can be quite tricky sometimes for the
beginner...and I get enough PHP errors so dont want to add templating errors
to that :-)

Just one last question, you guys can reply to this off list or on:
does using a templating engine slow down pages a lot (as i have heard) or
increase speed (as i have heard again) ? :-D

Cheers,
-Ryan




Chris Shiflett wrote:

> --- "John W. Holmes" <holmes072000@charter.net> wrote:
>
>>Use a template engine to separate your presentation from your logic. :)
>
>
> Isn't PHP a templating engine? :-)

Of course it is, but what's that got to do with separating presentation
from logic (business logic)? Each one can be PHP code... :)

Bad answer, I know, because his code could be a PHP "template". I'm sure
it's not, though. I just wanted to give a different answer from the many
"it doesn't matter" answers.

--
---John Holmes...

Amazon Wishlist: www.amazon.com/o/registry/3BEXC84AB3A5E/

php|architect: The Magazine for PHP Professionals - www.phparch.com

Ryan A wrote:

> Just one last question, you guys can reply to this off list or on:
> does using a templating engine slow down pages a lot (as i have heard) or
> increase speed (as i have heard again) ? :-D

Depends upon your application and the templating engine. Many options
either way. In my cases, the benefit is easier code to maintain with no
noticable slowdown. Good trade off for me.

--
---John Holmes...

Amazon Wishlist: www.amazon.com/o/registry/3BEXC84AB3A5E/

php|architect: The Magazine for PHP Professionals – www.phparch.com

--- Ryan A <ryan@coinpass.com> wrote:
> Just one last question, you guys can reply to this off list or on:
> does using a templating engine slow down pages a lot (as i have
> heard) or increase speed (as i have heard again) ? :-D

Things like Smarty are slow in terms of performance alone, yes. The tradeoff is
that the design these solutions allow might make life easier for the
developers.

If your applications are serving ten million requests a day, Smarty is going to
be problematic, but you can still overcome this with some good server-side
caching (for example, is it necessary to dynamically generate a response for
every request if the data isn't very volatile?).

Chris

=====
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On Tue, 2003-10-21 at 23:12, Ryan A wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> Thanks for clearing up my little doubt, I wanted to know if there was a
> major differience.
>
> John, thanks for the reply and I know it makes sense (like all your replies)
> but I just kind of got my feet wet with php
> and getting to the interesting stuff, learning while i go along of course.
>
> I dont think I can take trying to learn a who new templating
> language/package while doing this because I hear
> some of them (eg smarty) can be quite tricky sometimes for the
> beginner...and I get enough PHP errors so dont want to add templating errors
> to that :-)
>
> Just one last question, you guys can reply to this off list or on:
> does using a templating engine slow down pages a lot (as i have heard) or
> increase speed (as i have heard again) ? :-D

TemplateJinn (part of InterJinn :) is a compiling template engine. You
can run it from the command line (or via a compile page) to generate
your site, in which case there is no overhead whatsoever since the
output is embedded PHP in content. The other style is to have it
automatically compile missing files that have yet to be compiled, or
compile updates -- this has a small overhead while it checks
dependencies at page load time.

Cheers,
Rob.
--
..------------------------------------------------------------.
| InterJinn Application Framework - http://www.interjinn.com |
:------------------------------------------------------------:
| An application and templating framework for PHP. Boasting |
| a powerful, scalable system for accessing system services |
| such as forms, properties, sessions, and caches. InterJinn |
| also provides an extremely flexible architecture for |
| creating re-usable components quickly and easily. |
`------------------------------------------------------------'

* Thus wrote Ryan A (ryan@coinpass.com):
> Hey all,
>
> Just one last question, you guys can reply to this off list or on:
> does using a templating engine slow down pages a lot (as i have heard) or
> increase speed (as i have heard again) ? :-D

One thing I always try to avoid is having the template engine
buffer everything while processing all the data from start to
finish.

In most cases a document has a top, left, content and bottom. And
in standard conditions the top and left should be sent before the
content is processed (which tends to take the longest to process).
That way the page appears to load much quicker, than sitting there
waiting for the website to respond with content while php is
gathering all the html to send.


Curt
--
"My PHP key is worn out"

PHP List stats since 1997:
http://zirzow.dyndns.org/html/mlists/

* Thus wrote Chris Shiflett (shiflett@php.net):
> --- Ryan A <ryan@coinpass.com> wrote:
> > Just one last question, you guys can reply to this off list or on:
> > does using a templating engine slow down pages a lot (as i have
> > heard) or increase speed (as i have heard again) ? :-D
>
> Things like Smarty are slow in terms of performance alone, yes. The tradeoff is
> that the design these solutions allow might make life easier for the
> developers.
>
> If your applications are serving ten million requests a day, Smarty is going to
> be problematic, but you can still overcome this with some good server-side
> caching (for example, is it necessary to dynamically generate a response for
> every request if the data isn't very volatile?).

(more i do things like...)

I usually set up a minimum of 3-4 levels of caching:

. regular document, only regenerate when last modified. (much easier
if apache handles this)

. Session lifetime. Things that change specifically to a session.
Like last-login:

. Per visit. although harder to detect, things like page
counters.

. per request. Usually this level means no caching but in certain
cases this can fine tune performance under heavy loads.


So when I set up a page I'll assign it a different cache level for
it and generate a fresh copy depending on the level and all the
rules I set up for the level.


Curt
--
"My PHP key is worn out"

PHP List stats since 1997:
http://zirzow.dyndns.org/html/mlists/