Re: New KDE web site.

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim helixcode com>]

On Sat, Nov 04, 2000 at 12:09:16PM -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
> Alan Cox <alan redhat com> writes:
>>> It is a very bad idea to do on-the-fly processing on static data (PHP as
>>> opposed to WML), because it causes the generated pages to have an
>>> expiration age of 0, thus making the user agents reload the pages every
>>> time they are visited (which is really bad for users with slow links).
 
>> That depends if you set it otherwise or not. Implementation issue. Doing
>> the processing in advance is good for machine load however
 
> If system load from PHP is high enough to be a concern, I'm
> absolutely positive (without having to look) that someone has
> a system for doing server-side caching of the generated
> content. 
 
> [ or it could be set up with wget from a cron job in a few minutes ]
 
> I tend to agree with Joakim here that ditching WML would be a good
> idea - WML is a pretty amazingly cludgy tower of M4, Perl, its own
> variable substitution and 2 or 3 other things (!). And since we're
> using a mix of WML and PHP, we'eve lost the main advantages of WML -
> static content and the ability to test without a web server.

Additionally, one of the main reasons people tend to think that PHP is slow
is that they're not seeing bare PHP, they're seeing PHP with lots of database
access, etc. This is indeed heavy on the server, as I aptly demonstrated on
www.gnome.org in late May (ahem).

However, just parsing PHP and doing header type styff with it is really
lightweight. Especially if you use PHP4. Database generation stuff can be
cached in the same way we cache stuff from news.gnome.org and the recent aps
headlines on the frontpage today.

-- 
Joakim Ziegler - Helix Code web monkey - joakim helixcode com - Radagast IRC
      FIX sysop - free software coder - FIDEL & Conglomerate developer
            http://www.avmaria.com/ - http://www.helixcode.com/