PHP

Compression of HTTP pages is one of the best-kept secrets of the web. Few
people know that, but literally all the major browsers today are capable of
working with compressed content, decompress it on-the-fly, and show it as if it
was uncompressed. If properly implemented, the use of content compression
can result in the reduction of around 90 percent of your HTTP traffic, while
both saving bandwidth and improving the experience of users over slow links. (more…)

Dynamic content caching is by far the most effective way to boost perfor-
mance, in the cases where it is applicable, because it eliminates both the com-
pilation and execution overhead of your application. In simple terms, content
caching means saving the results of your application, typically HTML con-
tent, and then sending it out as-is again when another request comes along
that asks for the same page. With dynamic content caching, improvement
ratios of 10,000 percent (100 times better performance) are not uncommon.
The downside is that it’s not applicable for all PHP pages. (more…)

The Zend Performance Suite’s Acceleration module, which performs com-
piled code caching, is the simplest and often the most effective way to speed up
your application. To understand what Acceleration does, we first need to go
back to the execution architecture of the Zend Engine. In the previous section,
you saw how the engine first compiles your PHP files into in-memory repre-
sentations (intermediate code), and then executes. (more…)

ZPS is a commercial product from Zend.com. ZPS provides tools for
Automatic Optimization. By using the Zend Optimizer (http://
www.zend.com/store/products/zend-optimizer.php), you can improve your
performance by 20 percent without making any code changes. (more…)