What's the performance cost of “include” in PHP?

Question

Just wondering if anyone has information on what \"costs\" are associated with including a LARGE (600K or more) php file containing 100s of class files. Does it really make

Answer 1

APC will save you a lot, but I don't know if it will be negligible if your source is 600k. That is about 15000 lines of code? Not that much for a website, but quite large for a single file.

You'd rather use a more dynamic approach and isolation specific functionality in specific classes. Then, for each page, you can choose which code is needed.

Especially when you use APC, this approach will be better, because you don't have the overhead of file I/O which you will have when you load many small files from disk. I would choose to implement small, specified classes and put each of those in a separate file. You can use the PHP class loading mechanism (__autoload) to automatically load the right units.

When you figure out a good naming convention for your classes and units, this will make your development a lot easier.