Smarty

[_Will]

I read somewhere that using Inserts on templates to get around the caching feature can have a negative impact on performance.

This concerns me as I am building a large membership (free) based site, where the users can register for extra features. Their login status is checked by an insert I have on every page which calls two functions (session/cookie checker + userdetails retriever) and then outputs a link to their profile in the same place on each template.

Is there an alternative method to using an Insert, or was the person that spoke of poor performance un-informed?

Thanks

[messju]

no there is no real alternative at the moment.

but "poor performance" compared to what?

compared to zero inserts in the cached template?
yes of course.

compared to a not-cached template?
unlikely, but it depends on your whole application/setup.

maybe the person who said that has read the sourcecode how insert is implemented and it *looked* slow to him/her. but i'm sure he/she never benchmarked it.
maybe he/she got fooled by http-caching-headers that are sent when displaying cached-templates with no inserts, but are not sent, when the template contains inserts, since the template isn't considered cacheable (in a http-meaning) then.


okay i could imagine an alternative:
instead of $smarty->display("cached-template-with-inserts");

you can do
$source = $smarty->fetch("cached-template-without-insert")
then replace certain parts in $source by your dynamic contents.
then: echo $source.

but i don't think there will be that much difference in runtime to {insert}, that it's worth the effort

greetings
messju