What is faster, flat files or a MySQL RAM database?

php sql mysql performance flat-file
Robin Rodricks picture Robin Rodricks · Sep 17, 2009 · Viewed 7.2k times · Source

I need a simple way for multiple running PHP scripts to share data.

Should I create a MySQL DB with a RAM storage engine, and share data via that (can multiple scripts connect to the same DB simultaneously?)

Or would flat files with one piece of data per line be better?

Answer

gahooa picture gahooa · Sep 17, 2009

Flat files? Nooooooo...

Use a good DB engine (MySQL, SQLite, etc). Then, for maximum performance, use memcached to cache content.

In this way, you have the ease and reliability of sharing data between processes using proven server software that handles concurrency, etc... But you get the speed of having your data cached.

Keep in mind a couple things:

  1. MySQL has a query cache. If you are issuing the same queries repeteadly, you can gain a lot of performance without adding a caching layer.
  2. MySQL is really fast anyway. Have you load-tested to demonstrate it is not fast enough?

Related questions

How can I prevent SQL injection in PHP?

If user input is inserted without modification into an SQL query, then the application becomes vulnerable to SQL injection, like in the following example: $unsafe_variable = $_POST['user_input']; mysql_query("INSERT INTO `table` (`column`) VALUES ('$unsafe_variable')"); That's …

Read More
MySQL query String contains

I've been trying to figure out how I can make a query with MySQL that checks if the value (string $haystack ) in a certain column contains certain data (string $needle), like this: mysql_query(" SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE `column`.contains(…

Read More
How to 'insert if not exists' in MySQL?

I started by googling, and found this article which talks about mutex tables. I have a table with ~14 million records. If I want to add more data in the same format, is there a way to ensure the record I …

Read More