Good answer. I'm not saying that including code you don't want to use isn't going to shave of milliseconds, I'm just not convinced that the problem is being adequately identified. The problem honestly sounds like the codebase itself. And if that's something built with Zend, then perhaps that doesn't reflect well on Zend's innate structure, and Zend's only effective way around this is through 'autoload'.
> The problem honestly sounds like the codebase itself.
Any reasonably sized codebase is going to load a lot of files. Because your projects are so small that this is not an issue is not a reflection on the quality of every one else's work.
The subject of the conversation: "Given that (a) we need to load files (b) loading files takes time ... do we, consider performance: (1) use an autoloader on some mega-framework; or (2) be explicit and require directly."
I feel this comment contributes nothing to the conversation but a baseless personal accusation.
On the subject of the conversation, we can either let the computer do the work for us or waste time specifying it manually in a way that it's nearly impossible to do as effectively.
The code is already explicit enough, requiring directly is pointless busy-work that is more likely to be wrong.
