On the blog at HackersCenter.com, there's a new post looking a a few simple ways to help optimize your PHP code. Sure, most of the everyday scripts developers write don't benefit a whole lot from shaving off those extra milliseconds in execution time, but it's always a good practice to get into when you get into those larger scripts.
Php optimization is the skill of fine tuning an application to extract maximum performance with minimum server load. Many of my clients in the past have wondered why I spend extra hours just to get the script execution time to be cut down by 1 second.
However if you consider an average large scale application, it would receive about 1000 unique visitors an hour (approximation based on average statistics for my clients websites) and an average of about 8 page views per user. This would mean that your server would face 8000 requests for that page every hour.
The author follows this up with a few more stats before getting on with the heart of the article - the tips and tricks. They demonstrate a sample function to help test the speed of the script before looking at different topics of optimization - outputting an array, regular expressions, using references, and file inclusion. For each, there's a "slow way" and a "fast way" - I wonder which is the better choice...
