So, I program in a procedural way for the most part, but have some experience with objects in PHP, Java, and a little C++. For my current project, Im considering making a switch to objects but I'm confused about whether or not this will be beneficial from a performance point of view.

My project deals with online flash cards, and its built in code igniter. The way its set up right now is that I use a function for each thing i need to access, and they are pretty unrelated. So, if I just need to display the title and description of a deck, I might call a function like:

Then, if I'm displaying the deck info along with that deck's tags, votes, comments, individual cards, and some other things, I'll simply call a function for each thing, set the results to an array, and then loop through the array and display those things.

I'm thinking my code would be nicer if I just made a deck object to handle all this, but I'm worried that an Object Oriented approach will use more resources than necessary.

For instance, If I had my deck object, it would take a deckId as a parameter and in the constructor it would get the basic deck info (title, description, dateEdited, etc). Then if I wanted the comments I would call $deckInstance->getComments();

What I'm worried about is that in many cases, like when I update the comments with ajax, I will only need the comments and not the basic deck info. It seems like I'm completely wasting a query in the constructor to get the basic info if i'm only going to use the comments. Is this worth worrying about? Should I not have the constructor get any data, and reserve the basic info for its own method? This seems strange though, for a deck object to exist, and not even store its title or the id of the user who created it.

Also, I have considered getting all the data in the constructor, so that I could access it all easily after making an instance of the object, but I feel like this would be a major waste of resources.

If I go the route where the constructor does not go to the database at all, then I feel like I'm not benefiting much from the Object Approach, I'm just grouping together a series of procedural functions.

Sorry this is so long, but I never know when or how to best use objects. Any thoughts?

__________________
Something interesting... If you visit one of my sites today, you'll probably double my unique visitors for the day! Shameless Plugs:
My Blog My Octopus Game My Flash Card Website