Don Raman has a new post to his IIS blog today with a quick bit of information that Joomla users could use to get better performance with WinCache, integrated directly into the CMS's caching system.

Now that we have WINCACHE 1.1 Beta released which has got implementation for both user and session cache, one can easily take advantage of WINCACHE user cache and increase performance of Joomla. In this post I am going to tell you steps to use WINCACHE user cache with Joomla.

There's a class you'll need to copy and paste to create a new Joomla caching component, but after that it's as easy as having the WinCache tool installed and changing your configuration options to use the new wincache connector class for the CMS's caching.

Here's a direct link to grab this latest version of WinCache since it only works with version 1.1.0 and higher - WinCache.zip.

From the Joomla blog today there's a new post looking at a few things that you can do to help speed up your site's Joomla installation - simple things that can make a lot of difference.

I'm going to outline some basic rudimentary steps that you can take to optimize your sites performance, and I'd like to hear any other suggestions that you may have ... here's the kicker though, steps users can take WITHOUT making addons to Joomla [...] I also think the majority of Joomla users are running Joomla in a shared hosting environment, so talking about too many server side optimisations could also overwhelm them with steps they are unable to take anyway.

Their suggestions involve enabling caching, keeping up with the latest version, checking on the PHP versions your hosting company is running (or you are) and optimizing some of the contents of the site like images, javascript or CSS. Check out the comments for other suggestions from other Joomla users.

On the PHPClasses.org blog today there's a new post that talks about source code compilers and a few of the popular PHP compilers to help you optimize your code.

Several PHP compilers existed since many years ago, but the fact that it is actually Facebook releasing their [HipHop] compiler made it a very relevant matter for PHP developers, as Facebook is currently the busiest site in the world that is developed mostly in PHP.

He briefly explains what compilers can do for you (with diagrams) and takes a look at some of the native machine code compilers like Roadsend, PHC Open Source Compiler and Facebook's HipHop. He's also run a few benchmarks to show the performance of the resulting compiled code from each compiler. Some general conclusions are also included like dynamic vs. static PHP, opcode caching and the effects of I/O operations on script execution.

In a new post to the Zend Developer Zone Jayson Maynard reminds you of some of the upcoming webinars from Zend that'll be happening this month. There's four of them in the list:

• Best Practices for Magento Development
• PHP Performance: Principles and Tools
• Zend Server for IBM i in Action
• Simpler Debugging, Better Performance: What's New in Zend Server 5.0

All events are free to attend, so if you're interested, click on the links above to get more information on the session and to sign up.

New on the ProDevTips.com blog there's an article talking about the use of memcached on Dapper to increase the overall performance of the site.

Memcached is a very simple thing at heart; a daemon that runs in the background and that can be called from your code to store a value with the help of a key, and then retrieve said value with the help of the key used to store it; and it all happens in the RAM.

He talks briefly about the installation of the memcached server (on Ubuntu, in his case) via the source including a little trick he needed to do to get it to work correctly with the ld.so.conf file. He also includes the code for a simple class to implement it in your application.

From the ImproveSpeed.info blog there's a recent post about a quick way you can speed up your WordPress site (especially one that gets a higher load) by making some modifications to your .htaccess file.

It is known the importance of the page loading speed over the traffic of your blog. Recently there were a lot of discussions and probably the page loading speed will become an important SEO factor for google and other search engines. The main problem with the existing .htaccess file is that the RewriteCond directives checks the existence of a file on disk when it is not really required. Each access to disk increase the page loading time.

They show how to take the stock .htaccess configuration and modify it (still using mod_rewrite rules) to get a bit more fine-grained in the filtering of how requests are handled, things like having the index.php requests are forwarded automatically on or not caring about images or CSS.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today there's a new episode from their Dutch PHP Conference 2009 recordings series, Rob Allen's talk on caching and performance.

More, now than ever, websites need fast response times and be able to cope under load. As web pages contain more and more dynamically generated content, the challenge is on for PHP developers to develop efficient caching solutions. This presentation will focus on using caching techniques that can be used in a PHP project to increase the performance of a web site

Rob's talk looks at a few different means for caching and gives some "before" and "after" statistics to show how much of a difference each of them makes. You can either listen via the in-page player or you can download the mp3 directly.

On the Zend Developer Zone there's a recent tutorial from Chris Renner focusing on the use of the Zend_Cache component of the Zend Framework to increase the performance of your site by caching chunks of data to easy retrieval.

The applications I develop and manage are very heavy with database transactions. Hitting the db every time you need an object is a serious performance bottleneck, and on a shared environment can be troubling to other applications living in the same environment. I'm going to describe my experiences with Zend_Cache here, but I am not going to bore you with lots of code detail and specifics.

He talks about the frontends you can use to cache the data to different types of formats, includes a code example for caching objects with the component and how to clear out the cache when you need to refresh the content.

In the spirit of several others on the web this holiday season, Stoyan Stefanov has started up his own advent calendar. He's already posted several articles in the series including:

• The performance roadmap
• Required reading
• The pain points of having fewer components
• Data URIs, MHTML and IE7/Win7/Vista blues

You can keep an eye on this post for an update as each new article is added to the calendar.

Following on the heels of his previous post, Micro Optimizations that Matter, Brandon Savage has taken on all of the articles out there that tout several common misconceptions about what micro-optimizations make your scripts really run faster in this new post to his blog.

Last week I wrote about some optimizations you can apply to your code that will improve the performance of your site significantly. I also mentioned that regularly an article pops up talking about ways to shave time off your scripts, and I talked about how these articles mostly are bunk. Like this one. The article I linked above is a run-of-the-mill micro optimization list. The difference here is that the author actually makes use of some benchmarks to make their point. So, let's go step by step and discover together why this article takes longer to read than the amount of CPU time it saves.

He covers a few different categories including looping, quotes in strings, echo versus print, pathing, timestamps and using the regular expression functions (like ereg_* and preg_*).