a canadian startup

writing efficient php – slide deck

in the last waterloo democamp, i gave a presentation on how to make PHP + MySQL web applications more efficient (but most suggestions apply to any web server configuration). this is the slide deck from that presentation.

if you or the developers that work for you make a web application that serves many users, you should look at this site (especially if you use PHP+MySQL).

the main point in this presentation is that intelligent caching is the best way to make your site blazing fast. there isn’t really a way around it: every serious web application will eventually need some sort of intelligent cache on its site (so plan ahead).

here is a pdf version of the presentation: php3.pdf

to make this presentation, i used two other public slide decks heavily:

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/mysql/scaling-mysql-and-php.html

is a presentation about the challenges yahoo had in scaling and some of their solutions.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/21793/Scaling-PHPMySQL-Presentation-from-Flickr

is a presentation about flickr’s challenges in scaling php-mysql.

there is some source code stripped from the slides i provided above on how we do file-based caching. but this link:

http://www.rooftopsolutions.nl/article/107

has an even better implementation that you can use for file-based PHP caching.

the other significant point i mention in my slides is the use of the ionCube PHP Accelerator. an issue raised by jason hanley in an email to me is that ionCube’s accelerator doesn’t work for PHP5 but i now highly recommend APC: http://ca3.php.net/apc instead. APC is what facebook uses, apparently, for php acceleration. we’ve had great benefit from using php acceleration.