As it might be expected, there are several techniques to optimize the delivery of web pages. The Exceptional Performance guide by Yahoo is a great resource for a multitude of optimizations practices, including specifically two techniques which I will address in this article - script minifcation and concatenation.

Suggestions include reducing total request counts and minification of external libraries via the Minify tool.

You already know that Eclipse PDT provides autocompletion and hints for PHP's built in functions. In addition, commenting your code with PHPDoc adds autocompletion and hinting for your application's classes, methods, and variables. If you haven't already discovered, Eclipse PDT also provides autocompletion of PHP's control structures, class definitions, and methods through code templates.

He gives examples of both the templating and the snippets - inserting a switch() statement template and how to create a custom snippet of whatever code you choose.

• CakePHP Installation: Quick Start - a tutorial about how to install CakePHP framework
• CakePHP Installation: Introduction - a tutorial with a CakePHP Introduction
• PHP Supported Metacharacters (You Must Know Them) - a reference about metacharacters and metasequences
• HTML Filters/Purifiers, The Need, and Introducing htmLawed - using htmLawed and purifying your HTML
• Speed Up Web Page Loading

Check out the rest of the site for more great tutorials and articles.

Antony got the idea to implement a C-like array wrapper in SPL: SplFastArray. The main advantage of that class is performance, it's indeed faster than PHP arrays. How so? No free lunch: The speedup comes from the fact that non-numeric indexes are not allowed and that the array is of fixed size.

The code sample shows the setting of the size for the array (and changing it) with a var_dump of the output result. This method is always faster than normal arrays, it just varies how much from system to system (anywhere from ten to thirty percent).

Derick recently committed a patch that improves the performance of code coverage data collection in Xdebug. [...] This makes PHPUnit's code coverage functionality so much more practical to use.

Two examples of it in action are included - one for XDebug 2.0.0 and the other for the development version, XDebug 2.0.1-dev.

I found the sfBuilders that are responsible for stripping the comments from the generated propel classes and also saw that there is a addIncludes parameter in propel.ini. Lets reuse that and modify the Builders to strip the inline includes and requires.

What he describes as a "tiny step" can help you squeeze that much more performance out of your Symfony application. You can download the patch file here.

The fact that type save comparisons (ala ===) are faster in PHP than the normal comparison operator (ala ==). The reason for this is simply, that PHPs loosly-typed-ness-auto-cast-code is not even touched with ===

He also points out an interesting condition that saves a bit of computing time - comparing the isset() of a variable to true over the count() to zero. Some of his benchmarking (code) shows this in action.

The short answer to is Zend_Log good (enough): yes; the long answer, no. First off, it does what it needs to do without too much fuss [...] but... It has a few fatal flaws in my opinion.

While he found the simplicity of the component nice, the flaws seemed to outweigh the good. Problems like code redundancy and a simple thing like writing out to the log file isn't handled well (can't be accessed directly, only through the interface - slower in the long run?). He's included some tests to check out the difference.

A few minutes ago, I released phar version 1.2.1. phar is a PHP extension that allows the creation of complete filesystems within a single physical file. In addition, a bootstrap stub written in PHP can be used to run a phar archive as if it were an executable file or shell script. Documentation on its usage and how to create phars is at http://php.net/phar in the PHP manual.

Greg mentions some other issues that were fixed and a refactoring of some of the stream operations to cut the speed in half.

Here is excellent news for you. mysqli_fetch_all(), which comes with mysqlnd, does the task of fetching the data sometimes twice as fast as mysqli_fetch_array(). Reason being: it saves a loop with function calls…

The mysqli_fetch_all function allows you to reduce not only code clutter caused by the loops, but also speeds up the process (by 60% according to his findings). This is based on his current setup, though - under different circumstances (and OSes) there were varying results, but none too much off of the 60% mark. The lowest came in at around a 54% increase.

Check out the entire post on more about this handy function and the full details of the "behind the scenes" of how it works.