A phar is to PHP what a jar is to Java. I spent a little time to see how easy it would be to make our latest eZ Components release into a workable phar.

He includes the few lines of code to make a package (four in his case) and a one-liner on how to use it in your application. Building the package is as easy as running a PHP command line call.

Others in the community have picked up on Derick's post and have checked into phar themselves - Sebastian Bergmann and Stuart Herbert (on benchmarking phar).

The focus of this post is not to show performance related items to specific PHP frameworks since many bottlenecks actually apply before running the framework itself that should certainly be solved up front. Therefore in this posting I attempt to look at simple items that can be deployed in order to produce finer tuned systems.

He talks about a few different aspects:

• PHP Performance Tuning (opcode caching, apc file priming, includes, loops, etc)
• RDBMS Performance Tuning (indexes in queries, query caching, archiving)
• HTTP Performance Tuning (content compression, css sprites, limit modules, etc)

There are 4 relatively easy ways by which you can speed up the time it takes a browser to download a page. Following on from my post on joining CSS and JavaScript files, I have written a PHP script which will automatically do all of the above.

He gives example code of the class in action and includes some screenshots of the benchmarks from the YSlow Firefox extension showing the improvements.

If you want to generate JPEG images with a limited file size, and at the same time you do not want to sacrifice too much the image quality, you have to find an approximated value for the quality factor that leads to an image with a file size near the desired limit.

The JPEG Reducer takes this approach, providing you with the ability to give it the quality you want and have it approximate the closest values to convert it to. There's a brief code example included as well. Check out the full documentation for the class here.