Performance and require / include

Hello List, i have a question about the require / include functions and performance. I try to divide my application into several files (e.g. templates and common config files) and they are included with the require statement. But is this really good for the performance? With only one user on the webserver it doesn´t look like a problem. But what about 10 or 100 at the same time? Or even more? I made a test, i included 9 files (in different directories) with variable definitions and functions and it took 0.087 seconds. then i wrote all the content from these 9 files to only one file and it took 0.0005 seconds to execute. Could this be a bottle neck, when more users access the application? What do you think? Are there other ideas to scale/devide my application? Greetings from germany Thorsten Koch