The Zend Developer Zone has posted their latest episode of the ZendCon Sessions podcast series - a talk from Christopher Jones on performance in Oracle.

Welcome to The ZendCon Sessions. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2007 in Burlingame, CA. We hope you enjoy today's session as we listen to Christopher Jones present "Performance Tuning for PHP with Oracle Databases".

You can get at it three different ways - either through just downloading the mp3, using the in page player or by subscribing to their feed to get this and other great recorded sessions from last year's ZendCon.

In this new post to his blog, Ian Selby talks about a method to "pump up" your web site's performance to give the most to your visitors - the APC cache.

Nothing's cooler than writing a bad-ass site or application and watching it gain popularity and a significant user base. By the same token, nothing's more frustrating that watching your app fall on its face when its running under high load. [...] Before you say, "throw more / better hardware at that mo-fo", why not take a moment and learn about APC: Alternative PHP Cache...

He describes the caching software - what it is and how it can help you and your application - and includes examples using a CacheManger class to store and set values quickly and easily.

In a (very) quick note on his blog today Stoyan Stefanov points out that a presentation of his posted over on Slideshare made the front page Featured section (with over 2600 views too!).

Not bad. Especially having in mind that this is the second time around. [...] Slideshare is a great service nevertheless, just like on youtube, you can spend hours browsing people's presentation slides.

The presentation was originally given at the PHP Quebec conference this year (2008).

As Johannes Schluter mentions, the results of some benchmarking have been posted concerning the performance of PHP 5.3 versus the current 5.2 series:

Dmitry posted results of performance test comparing PHP 5.2 and 5.3 to internals which are impressive numbers.

The improvements were measured based on several popular pieces of software like Drupal, typo3 and WordPress. The overall performance gian was around thirty percent across the board.

On his blog today, Mike Willbanks has started up a new series that will look at various caching techniques that are available to PHP developers now:

Welcome to the first edition of the PHP performance series, a new series that I will be explaining ways to gain efficiencies and squeezing more performance out of your applications. This first edition, caching techniques, focuses on ways to cache data to optimize your current sites. Some of the concepts here are fairly easy to implement while others may take strategic design in the architecture of your application.

The methods he looks at this time are:

• Opcode Caching
• File Priming
• Caching Variables
• File Caching
• Memory Caching
• Database Memory Tables
• RAM Disk

Gennady Feldman, in light of some of the recent talk about enhancing the performance of your PHP applications, has written up this new post comparing two of the more favored software packages - APC and Eaccelerator.

Some websites use other technologies like Java and face the exact same problems. There are different variables involved here and the most common one is database. So I thought i would post a couple of articles related to performance and tuning.

This this post of the series focuses on the first of the two - APC - and talks about places it's used and includes some general performance recommendations. These include "Don't try to throw everything at your poor database" and the importance of XDebug.

Based off of a previous article from Mike Willbanks, Stuart Herbert has posted some of his own thoughts on tuning and tweaking your applications for the best performance you can get out of them.

There's some good advice in there, and I thought it'd be a good idea to quickly add a bit more detail about the separate approaches that Mike raises.

He goes over the APC caching, memcache, the "gzip trick", the "Not Modified" header and optimized SQL statements.

He also mentions one thing that Mike didn't mention - a split between static files (no PHP needed) and their dynamic cousins. Having a more pure Apache (no PHP installed) can help give a minute jump in speed that, depending on the size of the site, could really add up from a user's perspective.

Mike Willbanks has posted an introduction he's written up giving some helpful hints at tuning your servers and PHP applications for performance.

The focus of this post is not to show performance related items to specific PHP frameworks since many bottlenecks actually apply before running the framework itself that should certainly be solved up front. Therefore in this posting I attempt to look at simple items that can be deployed in order to produce finer tuned systems.

He talks about a few different aspects:

• PHP Performance Tuning (opcode caching, apc file priming, includes, loops, etc)
• RDBMS Performance Tuning (indexes in queries, query caching, archiving)
• HTTP Performance Tuning (content compression, css sprites, limit modules, etc)

Arnold Daniels has a suggestion for developers out there to help improve the performance of their applications - check your loops.

So you have a script which is not performing the way you want to. The first thing you should do it try to find out what the problem is. There are some tools out there that can help you.

He mentions the profiler in Zend Studio as well as the one in XDebug. If you can't install those, however, he has another suggestion - FirePHP (a tool that can help time execution times in a simple and easy to include way.

With tools in hand, he offers a few suggestions as to what to check for and do in your applications:

• Get the data ready before going into the loop
• Don't do things in the loop, you can also do outside it
• Use create_function to aid you
• Be careful with abstraction in loops
• Sometimes you can prevent loops altogether
• Last resort: write an extension

The Zend Developer Zone has posted the seventh episode of their ZendCon sessions (as recorded at 2007's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo).

Welcome to The ZendCon Sessions. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2007 in Burlingame, CA. We hope you enjoy today's session as we listen to Eli White present "High Performance PHP & MySQL Scaling Techniques".

The usual three methods are all there for enjoying this new episode: grab the mp3 directly, listen using the player on the page or you can get this and other great episodes by subscribing to their podcast feed.