Pink: Think about open source software in general—whether it’s Linux or Apache. Suppose I’d gone to an economist or management consultant 25 years ago and said, “I’ve got a cool new business model for making software. Here’s how it works: A bunch of intrinsically motivated people around the world get together to do technically sophisticated stuff for no pay. And then after working really hard, they give away their product for free. Trust me: It’s going to be huge.”

Shirky: He would have thought you were insane.

[link] Cognitive Surplus: Th Great Spare-Time Revolution

To test out this tip, I setup a quick test to see how long each method took. Being a developer, I actually new quite a few ways PHP could be mixed in with HTML, so I setup the four most common methods. They are: only static HTML, echo-ing static HTML, PHP only where needed, and echo-ing everything (static and PHP parts). The results were how it first seamed, static HTML is faster… 200 times faster to be honest. So… I thought it would be faster, it turn out to be faster, and yet I still questioned the tip.

Here’s why I questioned it. A page loading time is made up of a few factors, one of them is the server processing the PHP, but the code is going to be processed at a rate of billions of commands per second. Although one PHP command never equals one command in the CPU, that’s besides the point. Removing these suggested lines of code is not going to change the speed up your website at all, because it’s only a couple of commands.

The truth is, while it may be 200 times faster to use static HTML instead of PHP, the total time of the slowest one is 1/10,000^th of one second. If you are worried about that amount of time, I’d like to point out that the human reaction time is 1/10^th of one second. But I will not stop there, here is the biggest factor that kills this tip… caching. If you have any caching turned on, such as in Apache or a WordPress Plugin, then it doesn’t matter if your page is a HTML document or generated through PHP, because a static copy is going to be saved in memory and the actual line of code you changed is never going to be processed. Using caching is one of a dozen ways to really speed up your site and doesn’t require hunting through a WordPress Theme.

Nothing against Pro Blog Design, just against that one bad tip that I’ve seen around the web. Sometimes it’s a matter of calling out tips and seeing if they hold up to what they clame.