What are the advantages and disadvantages of manually caching file names for faster search operations in PHP?

When dealing with a large number of files, searching for a specific file name can be time-consuming. To speed up search operations, one approach is to manually cache file names in an array or a database for quicker retrieval. This can significantly improve the performance of file searches, especially when the same files are searched for frequently. However, the disadvantage of this approach is that it requires additional memory or storage space to store the cached file names, and the cache needs to be updated whenever new files are added or removed. 

// Manually cache file names for faster search operations in PHP

// Function to cache file names in an array
function cacheFileNames($directory) {
    $files = scandir($directory);
    $fileNames = [];

    foreach($files as $file) {
        if($file != '.' && $file != '..') {
            $fileNames[] = $file;
        }
    }

    return $fileNames;
}

// Example usage
$directory = '/path/to/directory';
$fileNames = cacheFileNames($directory);

// Search for a specific file name in the cached array
$searchFileName = 'example.txt';
if(in_array($searchFileName, $fileNames)) {
    echo "File found: " . $searchFileName;
} else {
    echo "File not found: " . $searchFileName;
}

Keywords

caching file names search operations PHP advantages disadvantages

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