In a link from PHP Magazine, there's a new article over on the Oracle Techmology Network discussing Scaling Oracle and PHP.

Over the past nine years, PHP has evolved from being a niche language for putting together personal Web sites to powering some of the world's largest and most highly trafficked sites. The three most important design aspects of any high-traffic Web site are scalability, performance, and maintainability. Scalability means that your application's traffic loads can grow without fundamentally breaking the way it works. Performance is the ability to serve individual requests quickly. Maintainability is the quality of being able to fix, refactor, augment, or otherwise change your application without too much trouble.

He goes on to discuss how to implement these three design goals in an application throughout the process of connecting/managing your interface to the Oracle server, executing your SQL, and managing the data passed between you and your Oracle server. There's so many options for tuning your connections, but remember: that at the end of the day, a fast but incomplete application is worthless. It is easy to distract yourself with performance tuning and design abstraction to the detriment of your application.