In a new posting from PHPEverywhere today, John talks about some of the issues he (and the other phpLens developers) are running up against - code optimization.

Every time we prepare to ship a new major version of phpLens (eg. 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and soon 4.0), the PHP forms generator and app server we sell, we take pride in speeding things up. This is the time we all go into intensive code optimization sessions to find all the slow pieces of gunk we accidentally left in the code.

Unfortunately, things are not so easy. After so many versions, it gets progressively harder to find things to speed up. And even if we speed up one function by 30 percent, the fact that the function only consitutes perhaps 1 percent of the code means that we have speeded everything by 0.3 percent.

Following that path, he talks about the power of the xdebug module and how it helped to speed up their application. In addition, they give some general tips on smaller things to help you and your code get along a whole lot better...