in PHP, which is faster - reading a file or a database call?

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I've a web app built in PHP with Zend on a LAMP stack. I have a list of 4000 words I need to load into memory. The words have categories and other attributes, and I need to load the whole collection every time. Think of a dictionary object.

What's the best way to store it for quick recall? A flat file with something like XML, JSON or a serialized object? A database record with a big chunk of XML, JSON or a serialized object? Or 4000 records in a database table?

I realize different server configs will make a difference, but assume an out-of-the-box shared hosting plan, or WAMP locally or some other simple setup.

file-io optimization php database performance
9 Answers

I had similar problem and run some test for it. Here are the timings for 25 000 loops:

Read one long text from DB: 9.03s Read one file: 6.26s Include php file where is variable containing the text: 12.08s

Maybe the fastest way would be to read this data (once, after restart of server) with any of this options and create database stored in memory (storage engine: memory), but it can be little to complicated, so I would prefer "read from file" option.

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