Will including unnecessary php files slow down website?

Question

The question might prompt some people to say a definitive YES or NO almost immediately, but please read on...

I have a simple website where there are 30 php pages (e

Answer 1

Considering the size of your website; if you haven't noticed a slowdown, why try to fix it?

When it comes to larger sites, the first thing you should do is install APC. Even though your current method of including files might not benefit as much from APC as it could, APC will still do an amazing job speeding stuff up.

If response-speed is still problematic, you should consider including all your files. APC will keep a cached version of your sourcefiles in memory, but can only do this well if there are no conditional includes.

Only when your PHP application is at a size where memory exhaustion is a big risk (note that for most large-scale websites Memory is not the bottleneck) you might want to conditionally include parts of your application.

Rasmus Lerdorf (the man behind PHP) agrees: http://pooteeweet.org/blog/538