I have a site that I have to update at noon and midnight. I then use the cron to write a html page. the html page is included using php of course. Since I only need to update it every 12 hours I don't see the point of actually querying the database to show the results and just use a html file which has the results written to it. Is there any downside to doing it this way? It makes the most sense to me but I want to see what you guys think. I'm trying to optimize my site as much as I can for performance. Thanks
It depends - is a new html page getting added each day? If so, then over a long period of time you would be creating many many html pages, which has its obvious drawbacks. Other than that, the speed of accessing a database to insert the info is going to be a little quicker than opening up a file to write, however probably not a noticeable difference. I think you will find that you could do a lot more from interacting with a database. But if all you need is that simple, then it doesn't really matter.
You're caching a page that doesn't need to be updated frequently. It's a good idea. Your method is relatively primitive but as long as it meets your needs its fine.