Florian Horn has posted the first part of a series of performance tweaks for using PHPExcel to work with Excel spreadsheets and CSV data.

A few weeks back I covered a small article about a CSV-Tool optimized for memory usage and additionally tweaking performance. Our performance optimization sprint contained the improvement of read file data, processing and persist it. While the file data is relatively small referred to the file size, the amount of data sets can vary between 5.000 and more then 40.000 entities on an average, but may be a lot more in some cases.

This article is the first of a three-part series and describes how we tweaked PHPExcel to run faster while reading Excel and CSV files.

In this first part of the series he goes through three different tips to improve some of the basic performance:

• Cache Cell Index in Memory
• Iterators and GC Optimization
• Use Custom Read Filters

You can find out more about the PHPExcel library on the project's main page.