# PHP - File handling/manipulation question
**URL:** https://forum.kirupa.com/t/php-file-handling-manipulation-question/34388
**Category:** programming
**Created:** [November 1, 2003, 2:15pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/php-file-handling-manipulation-question/34388 "2003-11-01T14:15:29Z")
**Posts on this page:** 7
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@APDesign](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/APDesign)
#### Post date: [November 1, 2003, 2:15pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/php-file-handling-manipulation-question/34388/1 "2003-11-01T14:15:29Z")
Alright, I plan on making a news updating program for my website so I can stop using [blogger.com](http://blogger.com) (even though it works really well if you tweak it out with a bunch of PHP.) It seems like it will be easy enough to do this myself, but I would also like to take a stab at doing the autoarchiving and stuff. One thing I was wondering is if I saved every news update as a seperate text file, would that be a lot slower than saving all the news updates into ONE text file (possibly 1 month/text file or something.) So in short - is it faster to save everything to one file than it would be to save stuff to different files. If you have any thoughts, just throw em out, I would appreciate it.
Thanks!
---
### Author:  [@system](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/system)
#### Post date: [November 1, 2003, 2:32pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/php-file-handling-manipulation-question/34388/2 "2003-11-01T14:32:51Z")
it is probably faster to save everything to one file. This is because the majority of the overhead comes from opening/closing the file, not from reading the file, so if you stored info in multiple text files, you are maximising the overhead.
---
### Author:  [@system](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/system)
#### Post date: [November 1, 2003, 2:32pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/php-file-handling-manipulation-question/34388/3 "2003-11-01T14:32:56Z")
I’d use mysql but without mysql I’d save them into one file… otherwize there’s gonna be a real bug bunch of txt files…
---
### Author:  [@system](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/system)
#### Post date: [November 1, 2003, 4:03pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/php-file-handling-manipulation-question/34388/4 "2003-11-01T16:03:11Z")
alright cool, thanks for the info… yeah I would like to go with mysql too for functionality and ease, but I can only have 1 database, and I’m using it for my forum. Nice to know about the file opening/closing.
---
### Author:  [@system](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/system)
#### Post date: [November 1, 2003, 9:55pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/php-file-handling-manipulation-question/34388/5 "2003-11-01T21:55:16Z")
you can run a whole website on one db, i have a forum, a guestbook, a poll, blogreader etc in mine…you can use as many TABLES as you like…?!
---
### Author:  [@system](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/system)
#### Post date: [November 1, 2003, 11:12pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/php-file-handling-manipulation-question/34388/6 "2003-11-01T23:12:51Z")
Yeah what Eyez said. If mySQL is an option go with that. If not then just save everything in one text file.
---
### Author:  [@system](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/system)
#### Post date: [November 2, 2003, 2:59am UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/php-file-handling-manipulation-question/34388/7 "2003-11-02T02:59:30Z")
hmm, I’ll have to look into eyez… I really have no mySQL knowledge, I set up a forum and had to create a database for that, and it sounded like I would only be able to use the database for the forum. my host is [www.1and1.com](http://www.1and1.com), I don’t know if you are familiar with them or not… I’m looking at the page right now and I think I understand what you are saying about having a databse and then different tables - and that makes a lot of sense. Sweet, now I can do it with mySQL! Thanks a lot, I never would have known!