After experiencing some issues with an application running the Zend Framework, I realized there were a lot of things I was not doing to optimize my application. There are simple and more complex actions you can take to speed up your application. Since time is precious, and developers with an expertise on optimization are not always available, I've split this post into two sections (simple and more advanced). This post focuses on the simple part.

His simpler suggestions include using the YSlow extension in Firefox, minification of Javascript and CSS, merging CSS/JS requests, using gzip and avoiding CSS background images.

I hate maintaining this stuff manually so I've written a PHP script which takes care of merging files on the fly whilst also versioning the merged file automatically as the various component files change.

He gives an example of this simple script - defining which files to compress, defining the directory to pull them from, and using mod_rewrite to handle the Javascript file requests.