Jonathan Street has a few tips for developers out there looking to speed things up on their site - seven tips towards "lightning fast sites".

I was recently creating a small tool in PHP and found myself hitting the max execution time and getting a fatal error. As it was only for my personal use I just bumped up the max execution time but it made me stop and think about how I could improve the speed of those scripts I do put up for public use. Most people aren't going to wait for 60 seconds for a page to load. Naturally I hit the internet looking for tips.

The tips he came across (each including the simple benchmarks to show the differences) were:

• sizeof vs count
• is_int vs is_integer
• chop vs rtrim
• doubleval vs floatval
• fwrite vs fputs
• implode vs join
• ini_alter vs ini_set

Be sure to also check out his follow up post talking about building better benchmarks to test the sorts of tips he's given above.