On DevShed today, there's the second part in a two part series (another excerpt from the "Zend PHP Certification" from Zend) talking about getting the most out of your application and platform through some simple debugging/optimizing tools.

They start off with a look at debuggers - what they're for and a brief mention (high level) of how to use them. Next up is some simple suggestions for optimizing the performance of your application:

• Hardware issues
• Web server issues
• Avoid overkill
• Zip it up
• Database optimizations

They also include a simple recommendation that all developers, looking for performance boosts or not should follow - "keep your code simple".