Limiting the consumption of server resources

As our website grows, we will start to notice significant drops in performance. One of the main causes of novice programmers is poor server resource management. Many people are afraid of using the cache memory, and this is quite a serious mistake.

Let's assume that we are creating a website for a game created on Unity. We wrote the page, styled it, and put a game on it that was provided by another developer. After a while, you come up with the idea of a scoreboard stored in a database. The game programmer extracts the points data and provides them to you. You process this data and save it in the database. Additionally, on the website you place an array that retrieves this data from the database. What will happen?

At best, the page under load will stop loading for subsequent users. This is because each new user entering the website runs a script that downloads data from the database, which loads the server. Fortunately, this can be remedied in a banal way.

We will use the next two scripts in two separate files for this. They will be needed to save the result of the previously mentioned script result. And more specifically?

1. After launching the website, the first user enters it
2. The basic script contained in the file .php executes normally, and our next two scripts remember its result in a file .html
3. The next user entering the website now will no longer load the same script again, but will download our new file much faster .html
4. After the time set by us, our file .html will die and be generated again - this is to refresh the data

This solution, although it will speed up the loading of the page for many users. It has several significant drawbacks. Note that after each process of saving the output of the .php as a file .html, data downloaded, for example, from a database will not be refreshed on an ongoing basis for each user. For the lifetime of one file .html the results in the sample game scoreboard will be from the moment this file is generated, until the next generation.

It also cannot be used for every file. You have to find out for yourself whether in the case of our website something needs to be updated on a regular basis for each unique user.

However, this seems to be a minor drawback if we can limit references to the database from 200 to 1 with e.g. 200 simultaneous users.

To implement this method, we will need min. 3 files .php:

1. File with the script placed at the top of the target file - it will be responsible for checking whether the generated file already exists .html and whether it is already too old.
2. The file with the script placed at the bottom of the target file - it will be responsible for the end of the file generation .html, saving it to the cache and sending information to the browser.
3. Target file - any page containing a PHP script that we want to optimize.