Quick way to do data lookup in PHP

Question

I have a data table with 600,000 records that is around 25 megabytes large. It is indexed by a 4 byte key.

Is there a way to find a row in such dataset quickly with PHP without resorting to MySQL?

The website in question is mostly static with minor PHP code and no database dependencies and therefore fast. I would like to add this data without having to use MySQL if possible.

In C++ I would memory map the file and do a binary search in it. Is there a way to do something similar in PHP?

Answer 1

I would suggest memcachedb or something similar. If you are going to handle this entirely in PHP the script will have to read the entire file/datastruct for each request. It's not possible to do this in reasonable time dynamically.

Answer 2

In C++, would you stop and start the application each time a user wanted to view the file in a different way, therefore loading and unloading the file? Probably not, but that is how php is different than an application, and application programming languages.

PHP has tools to help you deal with the environment teardown/buildup. These tools are the database and/or keyed caching utilities like memcache. Use the right tool for the right job.

Answer 3

PHP (at least 5.3) should already be optimized to use mmap if it's available and it is likely advantageous. Therefore, you can use the same strategy you say you would use with C++:

• Open a stream with fopen
• Move around for your binary search with fseek and fread

EDIT: actually, it seems to use mmap only in some other circumstances like file_get_contents. It shouldn't matter, but you can also try file_get_contents.