[thelist] using #include

Eric Engelmann eric.engelmann at geonetric.com
Wed Jul 17 14:51:08 CDT 2002


<snip>
The negligible performance impact due to includes is far outweighed by
their usefulness [....] Consider the cost of buying
a bit more of RAM or a slightly faster hard disk versus the cost of doing
search and replace across all the pages.
</snip>

Its important to make a distinction between the "cost" of development and
the "cost" of a performance hit. If you trade "its easier for me to modify"
but it runs slower for 100,000 users, you're making your life easier at one
point in time (or perhaps any time you update the site) while potentially
slowing your site down for thousands of users over and over and over every
day. The "cost" of doing search and replace could be worthwhile if for some
reason the include actually was impacting performance.

In a high volume situation, I'd trade a few hours of developer time here and
there for a slightly faster site for 100,000 people any day.

In this example, the performance hit of ASP includes is negliglible, I
agree, and I would do the same thing. Its just the principle that "buying
more RAM" answer is not necessarily a good replacement for
performance-impacting coding techniques. Taken to the extreme, it can be
used to justify almost any slow performance progamming or architecture.

But then, RAM is cheap, so buy more anyway. :-)

- E





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