On PHPBuilder.com today Jason Gilmore offers some performance tips to make highly optimized code without having to use something like HipHop to get closer to the speeds you might need.

While HipHop may seem a rather esoteric solution to the performance problem, a method lies within the perceived madness; maintaining the website logic using PHP code allows Facebook to maintain a code base which remains accessible to a larger number of developers, with the added bonus of being able to deploy blazing fast C++ code. Of course, incorporating HipHop into your infrastructure might not be ideal, but that shouldn't stop you from striving to produce highly optimized PHP code. Read on to learn more about several straightforward steps you can take to boost PHP performance.

Some of the tips included in his list are obvious but could easily be overlooked like:

• Upgrade your PHP distribution
• Tone down error reporting
• Use PHP's native extensions whenever possible
• Use a PHP accelerator

Take a look at the full post for other suggestions and descriptions of each.