You say that you use conditional statements to determine whether or not to REQUIRE a file.

Just to make sure: You're not using require or require_once inside a conditional block, such as:

<?php
  if($condition)
  {
    require "some_file.php";
  }
?>

I'm asking this, because require and require_once are UNCONDITIONALY called, see the manual pages for require and include on this topic.

No feedback.

--Jani

I tried both include() and require():

<?php
  if(false)
  {
    require "some_file.php";
  }
?>

and

<?php
  if(false)
  {
    include "some_file.php";
  }
?>

Both performed poorly, which is why I'm submitting this report.
At the moment, I've changed my code to use only require() without conditions, as require() is much faster than include().

Including one more file decreases performance by 2x.
Including another file decreases performance by another 2x.
eg: If you have 8 included files, the performance would be decreased by 256x. This is the performance drop that I'm pointing out here.

I don't see your point.

Using require in a conditional block make absolutely NO SENSE, as it gets executed wheter or not the condition of the block holds true or not.

Of course the performance "decreases" when you load more files into your application: they need to be scanned, parsed and probably executed.

Never mind, I think that PHP can't handle parsing too many include files (Files too large/complex, more than 8 include files, not enough memory/CPU to handle PHP, whatever etc.)

Works for me.