PHP Performance

170. The Debate of Making PHP Faster using a JIT Compiler - Lately in PHP podcast episode 19

Posted on: 2012-01-05

The official PHP implementation is evolving too slowly, while alternative implementations like Phalanger and Facebook HipHop can run PHP faster thanks to the use of JIT compiler engines.

JIT compilation was the main topic of the episode 19 of the Lately in PHP podcast presented by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert who received as guests Miloslav Beno of the Phalanger team and Nuno Lopes of the PECL LLVM project to discuss this and other interesting topics of the PHP scene.

They also made a brief retrospective of what happened in the PHP world in 2011 and what they expect for 2012.

Listen to the podcast or read the transcript here.

 More ...    Post a comment    See comments (3)   Trackbacks (0)

168. Can .NET make PHP run faster than the official PHP implementation?

Posted on: 2011-12-15

Phalanger is compiler that generates .NET assemblies from PHP code, so it runs in a .NET virtual machine.

The latest benchmarks seem to indicate that PHP applications compiled by Phalanger execute noticeably faster than when they are executed by the official PHP implementation based on Zend engine, even when a caching extension is used.

Read this article to learn how Phalanger works and what lessons can be learned to make the official PHP implementation run at least as fast, eventually in PHP 6 based on Zend Engine 3.

 More ...    Post a comment    See comments (7)   Trackbacks (0)

155. Top 10 Wrong Ideas About PHP That You Should Get Right

Posted on: 2011-08-18

PHP is often a misunderstood language by people that either love or hate it.

On one side there are developers that hate PHP apparently because they do not quite understand how it works. They do not respect PHP and prefer other languages. So they lose many opportunities to make good money from the PHP market, which has so many high paying jobs for qualified developers.

On the other side there are developers that love PHP but do not take full advantage of the language because they are not fully aware of all they can do with it.

This article attempts to clarify some of the most common wrong ideas that many developers have about PHP.

Read the article to the end, so you may eventually start having a better perspective about PHP and take advantage of the opportunities that this language and the PHP ecosystem can provide you.

 More ...    Post a comment    See comments (48)   Trackbacks (5)

138. 2010: Yet another great year for PHP

Posted on: 2010-12-23

2010 was an year full of interesting happenings for the PHP development and its community of developers.

This article presents a balance of what were the most important happenings in the PHP community in 2010, as well a reflection of what we can expect for 2011 for PHP, as well for the PHPClasses site.

 More ...    Post a comment    See comments (3)   Trackbacks (0)

137. Hardware Accelerated PHP, PHP 5.3.4, PHP 5.4 hold off, mod_PageSpeed and AJAX 2 - Lately in PHP podcast episode 7

Posted on: 2010-11-30

On this episode of Lately in PHP podcast, Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert discuss the proposal of using video card GPUs to accelerate PHP.

They also comment on the upcoming release of PHP 5.3.4 expected for mid-December, as well the PHP 5.4 hold off debate that has been going on due mostly to the lack of consensus between core developers.

Apart from those PHP issues, they also comment of accelerating Web pages using Google mod_PageSpeed Apache 2 module, as well about the new features of XMLHttpRequest Level 2 JavaScript object to implement AJAX applications.

 More ...    Post a comment    See comments (2)   Trackbacks (1)

135. Accelerate Web Pages Automatically using Google Mod_PageSpeed: Unusual Site Speedup Techniques Part 4

Posted on: 2010-11-17

After several months of development, Google announces a stable release of mod_pagespeed, an Apache 2 Web server module that can automatically optimize the Web pages that are served by Apache without any changes to the actual scripts that generate those Web pages.

This article explains in more detail what is mod_pagespeedup and how you can use it to improve the speed of serving your site Web pages.

 More ...    Post a comment    See comments (16)   Trackbacks (4)

134. Unusual Site Speedup Techniques debate, Named parameters and Annotations - Lately in PHP podcast episode 6

Posted on: 2010-10-31

In this episode, Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert discuss several unusual site speedup techniques presented in recent articles of the PHPClasses site blog.

They also discuss the (non-)inclusion of new PHP features discussed by PHP core developers like having named parameters in function calls and the support of Java-like annotations in PHP code.

 More ...    Post a comment    See comments (12)   Trackbacks (1)

133. Accelerate scripts running multiple tasks in parallel using asynchronous programming: Unusual Site Speedup Techniques: Part 3

Posted on: 2010-10-28

Asynchronous programming allows developers to write faster code by running multiple parallel tasks at the same time.

This contrasts with the traditional synchronous programming on which programs perform a task and do nothing else besides waiting for the task to finish before proceeding to the next task.

This article explains better what is asynchronous programming and how you can implement it in PHP to develop code that executes tasks much faster.

 More ...    Post a comment    See comments (19)   Trackbacks (0)

132. Accelerate Page Accesses Throttling Background Tasks: Unusual Site Speedup Techniques: Part 2

Posted on: 2010-10-25

Web server machines usually do many other things besides serving Web pages. Often they have background tasks running that may slow down significantly the Web server processes that deliver the pages to the site users.

This article is the second part of the Unusual Site Speedup series that focus on what to do to make sure that Web server processes run as fast as possible by slowing down background tasks that may be taking too much machine resources.

 More ...    Post a comment    See comments (10)   Trackbacks (1)

131. Accelerate Page Loading: Unusual Site Speedup Techniques: Part 1

Posted on: 2010-10-21

In the latest weeks, several measures have been implemented to provide dramatic improvements to the speed of this site.

This article is the first of several that describe those measures and how you can also apply to your sites too.

On the first part it is described how to make Web pages load much faster when there is heavy content slowing down the page loading, such as advertising or widgets retrieved from other sites.

 More ...    Post a comment    See comments (28)   Trackbacks (1)