Symphony.

is there any way to create flat files from the database instead of just using the url as the file? mainly, i want to spit out xml docs and let them sit on the server.

so something like this:

http://www.site.com/content-xml/project-1/

would turn into something like this:

http://www.site.com/content-xml/project-1.xml

I'm wondering this b/c i'm not sure if it's just my server that's super slow (very well could be) or if it's a case of having a virtual file instead of a physical one that could be making the flash file i'm working with load slowly.

or is there another way that I could make my files load quicker like caching the files for a few hours or a day?

Did you check the ?profile pages of the URLs your Flash program is requesting? Poke around there to see if there are any unusually slow data sources. I have a feeling this might be what's causing the problem.

is there any way to create flat files from the database instead of just using the url as the file?

We've actually worked on a couple of projects that used Symphony in a similar manner. It might be worthwhile creating an extension for this, but I don't think doing this would be necessary to solve your problem.

You could just do some basic caching to achieve this, I've been playing around with using the method described here (http://simonwillison.net/2003/May/5/cachingWithPHP/) and it seems to work pretty well.

I thought that Symphony is cache-capable. Just that they've turned it off for the beta.

I have been using slideshowpro with a symphony created XML page and have not noticed any load time issues.

it could very well be my server ("dreamhost"). I'll poke around with your suggestions and see what i come up with.

Lewis, for your slideshowpro, is it calling normal symphony urls? or is this one of the projects you guys had symphony spit out flat files for?

Lewis, for your slideshowpro, is it calling normal symphony urls? or is this one of the projects you guys had symphony spit out flat files for?

Yes, a normal Symphony URL - similar to the default RSS page.

ok, well my friends/client got a (mt) dvs, so i'm going to move it to their server and see how it performs. Lewis, are you guys serving up that content on a slicehost server?

also, here are my ?profile stats:

Engine Initialisation                   0.0811 s
Page creation process started           0.0946 s
XML Built                               0.0257 s
XML Generation                          0.0001 s
Page Built                              0.0386 s
XSLT Transformation                     0.0518 s
Page creation complete                  0.1852 s

so i don't think it has to do with symphony. those stats are fast, yes? or am i mistaken?

Lewis, are you guys serving up that content on a slicehost server?

Joyent shared.

those stats are fast, yes? or am i mistaken?

Look fine to me.