There are several ways to improve the performance of your CakePHP application. [...] Any performance improvement that does not effect how data is retrieved, stored and cached is welcome. If it affects your entire site and not only parts of it, it's all the better.

The performance boost comes in the form of an update to CakePHP's reverse route lookup functionality. Normally a lookup would have to be parsed and resolved back to their original location. They figured a bit faster way around it though - breaking the reverse routing feature for the sake of speed. The code for the hack is included in the post.

It took us about 2 years to get the last 5% and I believe most of the kudos should go to IBM people, who continue to contribute lots of new tests. I hope that the Testfest will help us to speed up this process.

There are still a lot of items in the red that could use some tests, so if you're looking to help out write up some tests or check your area for a TestFest event to get some help.

Well, PHP boys and girls, this feels like quite a milestone: 50% of the 3084 functions that are bundled with PHP 6 have been upgraded to support and work safely with Unicode.

He includes a small chart beside the post as well showing where things are currently at like the safe vs unsafe functions.