get totals, best practice

[Frank Vèssia]

I'm wondering what's the best practice (in terms of performances) for obtaining total values. For example in my site I show to my users some stats based on their activities, like uploaded photos, total friends etc...I usually get this totals using a simple

$pages->find("...limit=2")->getTotal()

Could be more effective instead having a specific field just for the total, increasing its value on each action ? Of course with this solution I have to update this value on each user action...so I don't know if it's worth it...

[LostKobrakai]

getTotal() is the standard api way to do it. I'm not firm with the database related issues, but if you're really concerned with speed issues, you could use a small autoload module, which counts the pages on pagesave of relevant pages and saves it to a field. This is only a few lines long and you don't have to worry about all the different things users can do on the frontend. 

[Jan Romero]

If you find() a limited number of pages anyway, it probably won’t get any more performant than getTotal(), at least without venturing into hacky territory or cache-like approaches like LostKobrakai’s suggestion.

In this case, the PageArray returned from find() already has the total count ready for you, because it uses MySQL’s SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS by default! In fact, you can influence this by passing an options array to find() that recognizes the following keys:

/*@param array $options 
   - findOne: boolean - apply optimizations for finding a single page and include pages with 'hidden' status (default: false)
   - getTotal: boolean - whether to set returning PageArray's "total" property (default: true except when findOne=true)
   - loadPages: boolean - whether to populate the returned PageArray with found pages (default: true). 
       The only reason why you'd want to change this to false would be if you only needed the count details from 
       the PageArray: getTotal(), getStart(), getLimit, etc. This is intended as an optimization for Pages::count().
   - caller: string - optional name of calling function, for debugging purposes, i.e. pages.count*/

As you can see, if you do a find(), you get the “numTotal” property for free, and if you just want the number of pages without fetching the actual page objects, $pages->count() will do an SQL COUNT with little overhead. If you want to squeeze performance out of your site, this is probably one of the less worthwhile places to start.

edit: by the way, you can see the numTotal property of your PageArrays by var_dump()ing them. It’s one of the first properties it lists.

[Frank Vèssia]

Thanks guys