Smarty

[powerobject]

On a high-traffic website that does a db connection for every page anyway, which approach is more efficient:

1. Store templates in a database and retrieve from it (db connection already exists)

2. Load templates from the file-system (fopen, fread, fclose...)

thanks

[kills]

When using caching, it doesnt matter.

[messju]

when turning off $smarty->compile_check it doesn't matter, either.

[loginx]

One big issue you will encounter while storing template files in the DB is that the design team will have a really hard time making design changes to the application. This may not matter to you today if you are the only one working on a certain app, but if you ever need for whatever reason to involve a real designer in this sort of project, they will go insane.

I always found that designers are never too happy about working with templates in general, let alone if they need to connect to a DB to get to those files and re-upload them.

[boots]

[mrLenin]

Both ways are almost the same on a high-traffic website.
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[JasonDS]

I would say it's bad practice to store files in a database..

I am very stereo-typical about things like that.. I like to balance the load of objects and keep un-necessary content out of my code.

When designing something that affects every page load, you have to consider how it affects you, performance, and the server.

On your end, it's a great deal of folders and files being tossed away.

On the server's end, it means high traffic and a ton of looping. This of course affecting the average load time, as for every page-load there is a new query to get the file.

If you're looking for an easier method of loading the files, design a few functions that suite your needs and use them.

But I believe that the last files such as these belong, are in the database.

[boots]

Not really.

What the previous posters where getting at is that unless you've modified Smarty heavily to do otherwise, all template resources -- no matter where they originate from -- are compiled into a PHP file. Furthermore, this compilation only happens when the file is compiled; from then on, the compiled PHP file is used. Typically compilation occurs infrequently. The upshot is that, on average, you still get file system performance. If you are then using a opcode cache (like APC, eAccelerator, what-have-you) then those compiled files will exist there, just like any other PHP file.

The point is that Smarty's compiling means that any type of resource (template or config file) from any general source will on average have a similar performance profile to a strictly file based one.