On the Tideways.io blog there's a post sharing five performance optimizations you can make to your Symfony application that can help improve its baseline performance.

We will continue our performance series with Symfony (previously on Doctrine ORM and PHP). This blog post describes some of the fundamental aspects that affect Symfony performance at the core of HttpKernel request lifecycle. These complement the Symfony Performance docs, which mentions general tips such as Bytecode Caching and Autoloader Optimizations.

Their list of five suggestions touch several different aspects of the framework's functionality:

• Reducing Expensive Service Construction
• Slow Kernel Event Listeners
• Excessive Usage of Internal Subrequests
• Not Delaying Work to the Background
• Increasing "Framework Overhead" with Tons of Libraries and Bundles

Each of the items on the list includes a brief summary of why the change will increase the overall performance of the request. They also include a screenshot of the profiler showing where the performance issue actually lies.

In this new post to DZone.com, Giorgio Sironi shares a few helpful hints on using the APC tool to help improve the performance of your web applications.

APC (Alternative PHP Cache) is one of the orthogonal tools you can use to speed up the execution of PHP code. This article explains from scratch the correct use of APC's system cache (not touching the user cache, which is just a standard key/value map). APC has also other features like upload progress support, but the system cache is its main features and has such a little footprint on your code that you should throw an apc.php file to everyone picking on you for writing strings in single or double quotes.

He describes what the APC cache does for you (both on a lower, opcode and a higher, performance levels) and how it relates to the shared processes a web server uses. He finishes off the post with a quick guide to getting it installed and working ("pecl install") and some of the common settings to tweak to get the most of the functionality.