Which is faster/smaller/better?

Can you please let us know the context of what you are trying to do this in? It all depends on the context.

Not really, but here’s some clarification…

I have 300 tags, and 300 posts. All indexed individually in my sitemap.xml and indexed by Google. So for all intensive purposes Google sees each tag and each post as just a ‘page’.

Let’s assume each each of the 300 tags has a corresponding identical post, in other words when you look at the tag1 page it looks exactly like the post1 page.

Each tag and each post is displayed using their respective templates (tag.php and single.php).

Now the way the 300 tags and 300 posts is generated is different.

I can make a new tag simply by pasting 300 comma separated words inot the tag box, whereas to create 300 posts I have to add 300 new posts individually (not withstanding a bulk post plugin).

However each of these 300 entries are ‘created’ is neither here nor there, what I want to know is…

Does the 300 tags have a smaller footprint than 300 posts by way of searching, speed, querying etc etc etc.

If I could display the exact same information from either 300 tags OR 300 posts, what would be best?

Quick anser: No.

Longer answer: Not really. Each type takes slightly differnt DB queries, but all in all it’s pretty similar. The biggest difference that I can see is that a tag pag will need at least one additional query to get the contents of the rlated pages/posts/etc where as a page will have a single query to get it’s individual page content (depending on what extra data is stored in the page though).

Overall, 300 pages, post, tags, or anything else is really not a big amoung at all. If you said 3,000,000 then maybe I’d be concerned but 300 is really pretty much a baseline or starting point.

If performance is really that big an issue use a caching plugin to serve out cached versions of those pages and you’ll allieviate pretty much all of the DB overheard that you’re concerned about.