Server Load Question?
 

Any of you have much knowledge with server loads using php? Trying to figure out how bogged down a server would get if I was using a bit of php in each page. Say the server is getting 100k+ hits a day across hundreds to thousands of pages. The php involved in each page would just be passing the variable from the url then including a file with variables in it based upon the variable in the url. I am comparing it to just creating static pages but of course the amount have static pages would be 10x the amount of doing it by php. But by using static pages would it relieve alot of the server load and maybe some bw? Since I would need the pages to load quickly and smoothly I am just trying to weight the options of doing it either way. If any of you sales reps from hosting companies would like helping me out give me a yell by all means (ICQ: 146664255). I am looking for nice dedicated server options at the moment =). Thanks!

I wouldn't ask the sales weasles about the server loads, go to a techie.

That being said....

If you're not running any kind of big overhead like mysql, then you should be safe. A small ammount of PHP isn't going to harm the server to any great extent.

Yeah at first I was thinking mysql but it would have eaten up the server. So I figured if I just stored the few variables I needed in the users file name.php and included it depending on what was passed through the url it shouldn't be that much of a load. Since the variables would only be links and the only other php needed would be to display the links and thats it.

It's always been my opinion if you can do it static, and you're going to be pushing decent volumes, do it static. Dynamic content, no matter how insignificant it seems, always produces more cpu / memory stress than a purely static html page does. If you have the means, I'd suggest just trying it out and checking for yourself, but if I were consulting on the project I'd strongly recommend strictly static provided it wasn't a burden on development.

Checkout some PHP cache programs... Like

Turk MMcache... :thumbsup

V