This is a question about general performance through implementing the solution shown below. I am aware that this might be slightly opinion based, but I want to know if anyone has a clear idea as to if this is a good implementation, or if it should be solved in a better way.
This is just an example, but lets first create a class called Member. This will be instantiated multiple times when we are listing all Members in the database. Now, since in this example, this is an old and complicated system, every time the full list of members is shown, one member can be instantiated multiple times. So to reduce the entire operation of fetching the member every time, we cache the instantiated object in a static property of the class, and returns that if it already exists:
class Member {
protected static $cachedMember = null;
public static function get($id){
if ( isset( self::$cachedMember[$id] ) ) return self::$cachedMember[$id];
// If its not set, we fetch it from database...
$obj = new static();
// Fetching member from database and applying the applicable values to $obj
// Then we set the filled $obj to the $cachedMember static.
self::$cachedMember[$id] = $obj;
return $obj;
}
}
Obviously, this will take up some memory, depending on how many times the Member
class is instantiated with a unique member id. But this is released in turn when the script have ended (correct?). So as long as PHP has enough memory allocated, it's to my understanding no other downside to this implementation?