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I have a PHP file that contains a large array (about 90KB). I'm considering moving it to the database however I'm not sure it's worth the trouble.

In general, am I likely to run into problems with a 90KB array? Will I get any speed improvement by moving the data to a database?

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  • Like John said, arrays are much faster. I've built a caching framework which stores arrays into files (like the one you're talking about) and it's amazing when it comes to performance. Brilliant for AJAX calls. Commented Jun 12, 2012 at 1:46

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Arrays are much faster then accessing a database. Accessing a database is one of the more expensive things you can do in PHP while accessing an array is one of the fastest.

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What if you only need to access one element? Doing a quick DB query on an indexed table might be faster than parsing a file and assigning 90 kB worth of array variables. There has to be a cross over somewhere where the DB query becomes more beneficial. What about things like sorting? Surely an indexed DB would be faster than an array.
Mike makes a good point, I wonder at what point it becomes inefficient to load a PHP array and faster to do a DB query.
Nope, not @ 90Kb. This is small enough to get cached in the VFAT cache and even on a cache-miss will generate only one or two physical I/Os. The CPU overhead is trivial. The main things are to (i)ensure that you only write back on dirtied content, and (ii) to have a contention strategy if you have parallel transactions.

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