A Checklist for Improving the Performance of Your PHP Website

PHP is a scripting language that is responsible for powering a huge segment of the web. It is driving many popular websites that include Facebook and Yahoo also. Since a huge number of people rely on PHP, it is very important that the performance optimization is crucial for developing flawless and improved solutions. Optimizing PHP solutions will enhance the performance of the website and leverage the design by increasing the capacity and makes the codes lighter to load and also provides flawless performance throughout the life.

What do you understand by good PHP performance?

Performance and speed are not always the same thing. Attaining optimal performance is a balancing act that needs trade-offs between accuracy, speed and also scalability. Since slow loading sites are often a critical problem, which one can resolve only be embracing best coding practices, developers adopt several measures to test and run the code post PHP development. If a majority of the developers improve their coding standards, then they can succeed in running applications meticulously on the client servers.

A more sensible approach is to do the test during the development process and make the application function properly. Determining the performance parameters is also important and using adequate test data is required.

Identifying the bottlenecks:

This is the first step to solve any application performance issues. To find out the root cause of the problem, you can plan and select the best solution and option for your application. You can use a performance tool like Prefix or Retrace, which validates the behavior of your codes and much more. The tool will help you to recognize the bottlenecks and measure the performance and order it from highest to lowest priority.

Optimization of codes:

Another best method to ensure high quality of your PHPdevelopment codes is to have it optimized and utilize the memory, perform fewer inputs and output operations and execute rapidly. Code optimization doesn’t mean that the codes must be complex or there is a need to replace the standard libraries. Optimization also takes a lot of time to maintain codes and in many cases the applications also use multiple dependencies like PaaS service, ElasticSearch, SQL and NoSQL, MongoDB and etc.

Distributed computing: 

This helps in increasing the potential for executing parallel computing. The technique helps to increase the load on shared resources, mostly in the database systems.  Many web applications face problems when it comes to bandwidth distribution and latency and distributed computing helps to reduce the latency and avoid any sort of bottlenecks.

Cache like there is no tomorrow:

Creating a good cache strategy will help to reduce the number of database operations and also code compilations. Memcache is a better option for lowering the database load and the Alternative PHP Cache for code optimization and opcode caching. There are various options when we talk about caching in PHP opcode that includes eAccelerator, Zend Platform, XCache and etc.

Content delivery network:

This is another most effective means to boost the loading speed of your website with high traffic that have global reach. Businesses using CDN helps large scale websites to expand their geographic reach and the technique can reduce latency, bandwidth consumption and also secure the applications and block spammers and any other data scrappers that might attack the system.

Using the load balancing technique:

Load balancing has nothing much to do with the application, but it is more related to hosting and the infrastructure. In PHP, load balancing is configured in the plugins by using various techniques like round robin and user’s filter. Prioritization can also be done to server’s assignment. The only thing that has to be considered is that session objects should be avoided as it is stored in the memory of your local machine. You should also not store image files on the server. Placing them in the cloud is a better option.

With many PHP performance monitoring tools available in the market now, it has become easier for the developers to choose the best one that fits the needs of your application.