Which should I use?

[aryam]

Which should I use, require or include? Why? And whats the difference?

[v0id]

The functions works almost identical, but there's one difference. They both return a warning message is something is wrong, like the file don't exists, or similar. But require returns a fatal error, which means that the script don't continue, if something is wrong. include would continue.

[John]

Aside from the minor difference v0id pointed out there is a major difference in performance.

I've been reading a lot on optimizing my PHP code performance. In fact when I get time, maybe this weekend, I would like to do some in depth benchmarking on many PHP functions. When I was beginning PHP I found that there were many functions that do the same exact thing (neglecting minor differences) [include-require, str_replace-preg_replace, print-echo, ect...]. Your question was always in the back of my head. Which one is better? I never could figure out the answer, so I just randomly picked one.

However, with my resent research, I've realized that there are major differences regarding optimization. Just the other day I read an article from Zend and it stated that include() is seven times slower than require()

After that, I went back in my code and changed all my include()'s to require()'s because it even makes more sense in my case.

[Jordan]

Originally Posted by Sidewinder

Aside from the minor difference v0id pointed out there is a major difference in performance.

I've been reading a lot on optimizing my PHP code performance. In fact when I get time, maybe this weekend, I would like to do some in depth benchmarking on many PHP functions. When I was beginning PHP I found that there were many functions that do the same exact thing (neglecting minor differences) [include-require, str_replace-preg_replace, print-echo, ect...]. Your question was always in the back of my head. Which one is better? I never could figure out the answer, so I just randomly picked one.

However, with my resent research, I've realized that there are major differences regarding optimization. Just the other day I read an article from Zend and it stated that include() is seven times slower than require()

After that, I went back in my code and changed all my include()'s to require()'s because it even makes more sense in my case.

That is interesting to know. What books are you reading for this information?

[v0id]

I agree, it's pretty interesting. Can you provide a link, or some other material where you got the information from?

I just picked this up from PHP.net:

Originally Posted by http://php.net/require

require() and include() are identical in every way except how they handle failure.

To me it seems like they're working in the same way, but throws different errors? Maybe the fatal error, thrown by require, is faster, because it don't have to give the user detailed information about what just occurred, it will just halt. But it still seems unlikely that this could cause the big difference in performance.

[Jordan]

Perhaps once it is Zend encoded there is a difference? Zend may be changing the response times of PHP functions somehow. It is hard to understand how once could be 7 times faster unless we are talking 1/7 Nano Seconds.

[John]

Originally Posted by Jordan

Perhaps once it is Zend encoded there is a difference? Zend may be changing the response times of PHP functions somehow. It is hard to understand how once could be 7 times faster unless we are talking 1/7 Nano Seconds.

The actual purpose of encoding in Zend is to make the code faster, hence the extension name "Zend Optimizer," but thats not what I was talking about. Just the performance difference between include and require while not encoded. Of course I'm not talking in a matter of seconds [actually depends on the file size], but with normal files < 50kb you wont notice a difference perse, but the difference is close to milliseconds.

Ill write an article on this because there is A LOT of tweeks people overlook such as:

PHP Code:

//requires path normalization
include "file.php"; 


is slower than

PHP Code:

//avoid path normalization
include "/home/user/file.php"; 


Ill see if I can get xdebug setup and post the statistics

[Lop]

Nice tips! I'd love to see/learn more, where did you learn them from?