Archiving file versions in ZIP – significant overheads?

I find myself working on a simplified versioning system. As with SVN, files can be committed, and older versions should be stored.

I am at the stage of working out the best way to store these versions on the server. Options include:

– simply as files
– files stored in an archive via PHP’s ZipArchve lib
– MySQL BLOBs (perhaps zipped/deflated as well)

I’m mainly looking at the Zip archive option, but my question is: would any saving in file size be negated by the overheads involved in PHP repeatedly opening, writing to and reading from this “versions archive”, or are these operations relatively lightweight?

Thanks in advance for any help

Also in #PHP _↴