On the Liip blog today Jean-Christophe Zulian shares an idea about gaining performance in your access controlled section of your application. He suggests preloading ACL information in Symfony2-based applications.

Symfony2 comes with an ACL mechanism that can help you whenever you need to add some permissions in your system. [...] Unfortunately we came across a situation where we had to do this kind of permission check on a very long list of items. [...] erformance will go bad (or very bad in our case) and as the system keep storing more and more of the same kind of data it become slower and slower. [...] Luckily for us Sf2 ACL system provides a way out of this. You can in a small amount of query load all the ACLs that are related to some given objects.

He includes a small snippet of code that takes in a set of blog posts (as an example) and calls a "findAcls" method to pre-fetch the information. That information is then available for the rest of the request. The fetch is done by packet instead of via one large query, making it a bit more performant.