Heyos, all.
Have a very weird thought I need answered.
Look at the following code snippets:
One uses multiple <?php tags while using HTML code for the rest while the other encapsulates the whole section under <?php and uses echo for HTML statements.
File is saved as .php
In theory, which has higher server performance overhead?
N.B. Pls excuse if the code is not up to industry standards. Just started learning web development as part of my course.
Generally as long as the code is to be handled by PHP, it is not the most significant overhead when coming to parsing PHP. Your bottleneck often happens elsewhere unless it is a simple HelloWorld application.
I don't dwell much into those aspect between fully writing an application using PHP codes or having PHP codes embedded among HTML codes; reason is simple. Both approaches are not the most advocated approach to web development regardless of programming languages. You are always encouraged to use various MVC approaches in recent web development methodology to segregate as much of logic away from the view/presentation layer.
I would suspect internally the HTML codes between PHP tags are slurp in and response as-is with no interpretation. This is probably faster since strings within 'echo' or 'print' statements are still liable to variables interpolation unless you are using single quotes. Even so, multiple statement calls to the functions are probably not going to be faster unless PHP has optimisation that combine several occurrences of print or echo together internally.
For PHP, all requests will normally result in tokenisation, parsing and compilation unless you cache using components like APC, XCache or any other such opcodes caching solution.
Moving into real industrial deployment, you will find caching happens at other levels too, using solutions like Varnish, CDN, or even browser caching of HTML results. These approaches will allow better scaling instead of the above optimisation that you have look at. If you are interested, look at the HVVM solution from Facebook to compile PHP codes into C for deployment. HVVM has its own set of caveats and will not serve all possible rendition of PHP codes.
My general advice to you is to not dwell too much into these as part of your learning. It's good to know, but you will realise industrial approaches nowadays are not optimising on everything, but things that make sense and have significant impact. There is the balance to maintain between cost-effort-time, and performance. The 0.1% performance you get out from this exercise will not scale for a web application meant for 1 million users. That could be easily upgraded from a 2Ghz machine to 2.3Ghz. Maintenance of the code, readability, consistency and design patterns for large scale development plays very important role to the success of a project from a long term perspective. There is absolutely no good reason to get 10% output performance if, at the end of the day, your company need to spend another 20% cost to upgrade, migrate or have knowledge transfer between developers.
That's my 2 cents experience for you to consider.
