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phpjsonapifile-get-contents

how to speed up file_get_contents and json_decode

I'm currently working on a fansite(just for my purposes) which gets all it's data from different APIs like this:

$newjson = file_get_contents(LINK_TO_JSON_HERE);
$newarr = json_decode($newjson);

My Problem with this: currently the site loads 13 different (huge)JSON-files, which slows the site down very much. The loading takes up to 30-45 seconds, which isn't really acceptable, but I tried to get it working before optimizing it. Is it possible to speed this up by using other functions? Seeing other fansites loading the same content within 1 second made me asking.
About the functionality: I load the whole JSON into the array and then take out the info I need, which is often less than 1% of the JSON-file's text. Is there a way to filter the things I need before loading the whole document into an array?

Thanks in advance

Solution

  • Odds are very high that the JSON is not slowing you down but just the file_get_contents(). Benchmark your issue properly so that you are not wasting your time optimizing the wrong thing.

    <?php
$start = microtime(true);
$newjson = file_get_contents(LINK_TO_JSON_HERE);
echo 'file_get_contents('.htmlentities($LINK_TO_JSON_HERE).'): '.(microtime(true) - $start).' seconds<br>';

$start = microtime(true);
$newarr = json_decode($newjson);
echo 'json_decode(): '.(microtime(true) - $start).' seconds<br><br>';

    Anyways, the best way to maintain real-time data and get better speed is to switch to curl_multi_exec()

    I'm not sure how often the data is updated on these APIs so you could also develop some sort of caching mechanism which fetches the data a few times per day and saves it locally to a JSON file.