Rodney Rehm

»It works!« is a state any piece of code needs to achieve. It's the goal most developers have in order to get the job done. But sadly »It works!« is more often than not, simply insufficient. It's a state that's only true for the moment. This post explains a few problems found in your average jQuery-based code.

For the release of Smarty 3.1.0 I refactored most of Smarty's disk access. As this optimization from September 2011 kept popping up questions on the Smarty forums, I finally felt the need to explain what I did. Although Smarty is the reason I discovered this, this post applies to PHP in general, not Smarty in particular. This post is all about laying the groundwork for you to realize two things:

1. Your operations are not atomic
2. Avoid accessing the hard disk unnecessarly