This book contains tips, tricks, and techniques to make new and existing PHP applications much faster and less resource-hungry. Author Armando Padilla looks at all major sections of the PHP application stack-from server hardware to database and web server performance. PHP program application performance is the center of this book, and Padilla shows you how to improve performance by best practices, proper design, and best-of-breed tools.

Padilla starts out by establishing performance testing and benchmarking methodology using common open source and browser-based testing tools. He then discusses best practices for PHP development, and also explains refactoring existing code, both with performance in mind. In addition to best coding practices, this book will teach you how to use and tweak Opcode caches such as APC, XCache, and eAccelerator.

Padilla then highlights how to support the efficient running of PHP applications, tweaks and settings by taking advantage of the GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems to improve hosting performance and reliability. Additional tips on web server improvements and database administration help round out the picture. Finally, Padilla presents some hardware example configurations tuned for high performance.

What you'll learn

• How to improve the performance of existing PHP applications
• How to maximize the performance of existing operating systems and databases
• How to refactor existing PHP code for better performance
• How to identify and rectify bottlenecks in PHP code
• How to take advantage of variable caching to increase performance
• Strategies for selecting server hardware for best performance

Who this book is for

This books will appeal to established PHP developers who wish to write new, complex applications or want to rearchitect existing ones. Developers of other languages such as Ruby, Python, and VB.NET will also have an interest in the techniques for tuning the performance of web servers, databases, and operating systems.

• Contents
• About the Authors
• About the Technical Reviewer
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Benchmarking Techniques
• Improving Client Download and Rendering Performance
• PHP Code Optimization
• Opcode Caching
• Variable Caching
• Choosing the Right Web Server
• Web Server and Delivery Optimization
• Database Optimization
• Appendix A: Installing Apache, MySQL, PHP and PECL on Windows
• Appendix B: Installing Apache, MySQL, PHP and PECL on Linux
• Index