Just wondering where people draw the line on modulising include files, what I mean by this is do you feel its better to have one large include file on all pages (so sometimes some functions etc in the include file are not used) or do you seperate them into smaller ones, where occasionally some pages may be calling for 5-6 include files??

Basically I wanted to know if its bad practice to be calling 5-6 or more smaller include files on a page?? Is this gonna be slowing things down a lot??

- Carl S

I designed an intranet site that utilizes about 10 include files per page, and i see virtually no decrease in performance.

The server has to run through the page at runtime anyways, and it really doesn't slow it down to pull a few more include files...

I think you have to decide if you want to optimize your includes for performance, or for maintainability. If you have 2 or 3 includes that are used together 90% of the time, you'll save a couple of I/O's by budling them into one include, but increase memory utilization on the 10% of pages where they're not used together.

Personally, I prefer organizing the includes for maintainability - e.g. all the I/O in one include, etc.

If you look at it from a cost perspective, on very large busy sites, it might be better to only include what you need, but for small to medium sized sites, human resources are more expensive, so maintainability is the largest cost factor.

MS has a stress testing tool that you can use, but probably a good rule of thumb is that you don't need to worry about it until the site requires a dedicated/co-located server.