MySql or Json for multi request? - php

Question

I have 1000 json files in my server and users request their file with something like this mysite.com/request.php?file=id and i should show them id.json .But before i show them i should check if id.json need to be updated or not .
My json files are something like this:
{
"response": {
......,
"lastupdate":14323342
}
}
In last update i store the last update time in seconds and if the current time is bigger than 1 hour i should update my file from somewhere else .
Now my question : Is it good to save lastupdate in Mysql or in each json file ?
If i use mysql i need 1000 rows and each row should have 2 columns ,first columns are id and second columns are lastupdate.And my users are more than 10,000 and each day and server hardwares is important for me.

Answer 1

If you're grabbing a specific file (not opening a "flatfile database" and search something), it should be faster than querying a mySQL db.
A thought form a similar case; if the same ID could be requested a number of times in less than an hour, AND if you actually don't need to update the last update time in the "json file" until a user is asking, then when there's a request to request.php?file=id I'll:
"try" to get and decode the json file, put the decoded to (eg) $data
if the file doesn't exist OR lastupdate is more than an hour
{
update the lastupdate, and update $data
update the json file
}
show $data
... it's basically a simple caching to try to get data from file instead of db, and to prevent updating (db query) when no one is asking.
You can safely rm -rf everything in the "cache folder" anytime.
if ( $data = file_get_contents( 'path_to_cache/' . $id . '.json' ) )
$data = json_decode( $data );
if ( empty( $data ) || $data->lastupdate < time() - 3600 )
{
// do query, put to $data
// encode $data, put to 'path_to_cache/' . $id . '.json'
}
echo $data;
... and actually, in my case I don't need to put lastupdate to DB. So I can simply use the json file's filemtime().