Gonzalo Ayuso has a handy performance tip for getting that little bit extra speed from your page load times - combining Javascript with PHP files.

One of the golden rules when we want a high performance web site is minimize the HTTP requests. Normally we have several JavaScript files within our projects. It’s a very good practice to combine all our JavaScript files into an only one file. [...] But if your project is alive and you are changing it, it's helpful to spare your JavaScript files between several files. [...] So we need to choose between high performance and development comfort.

He includes a quick script that runs through your javascript directory (recursively), grabs all of the javascript content from each, combines and minifies them to serve gzip compressed out to the browser.

Wojciech Sznapka has a new post to his blog today looking at the "power of PHP streams" and how they can be used to decompress gzipped data from remote servers.

Probably most of us heard about streams in PHP. They are background of all files and network operations in PHP, even if we don’t see it. Everytime when you use file_get_contents or fopen you are actually using streams. But there are many stream wrappers I haven’t used, because they aren’t well known.One of them is compress.zlib (and two other compression stream filters).

He includes a quick example (because, thankfully, that's all working with streams like this usually requires) about pulling in a file from his server and uses the stream to fetch and unzip the data to display the contents.

Based off of a previous article from Mike Willbanks, Stuart Herbert has posted some of his own thoughts on tuning and tweaking your applications for the best performance you can get out of them.

There's some good advice in there, and I thought it'd be a good idea to quickly add a bit more detail about the separate approaches that Mike raises.

He goes over the APC caching, memcache, the "gzip trick", the "Not Modified" header and optimized SQL statements.

He also mentions one thing that Mike didn't mention - a split between static files (no PHP needed) and their dynamic cousins. Having a more pure Apache (no PHP installed) can help give a minute jump in speed that, depending on the size of the site, could really add up from a user's perspective.

Leon Chevalier has posted about a class he's developed (you can download it here) that can help to speed up the load times for your site.

There are 4 relatively easy ways by which you can speed up the time it takes a browser to download a page. Following on from my post on joining CSS and JavaScript files, I have written a PHP script which will automatically do all of the above.

He gives example code of the class in action and includes some screenshots of the benchmarks from the YSlow Firefox extension showing the improvements.

On the JSLabs blog today, there's a (short) new tutorial showing an alternate method to creating a Zip archive in PHP (rather than with the zip extension).

He illustrates the creation of simple archive that pulls in a test file from a given path. This is then pushed into the zip archive and packed down and exported. He also notes the different compression levels that it can be created with - no compression, bzipped and gzipped.

You can download the library here.

On the JSLabs blog today, there's a (short) new tutorial showing an alternate method to creating a Zip archive in PHP (rather than with the zip extension).

He illustrates the creation of simple archive that pulls in a test file from a given path. This is then pushed into the zip archive and packed down and exported. He also notes the different compression levels that it can be created with - no compression, bzipped and gzipped.

You can download the library here.

In this new post, Justin Silverton shares a few helpful hints for creating high performance applications in PHP:

• use multi resultset queries to your database rather than many small ones
• page/object caching
• gzip compression
• tune your web server
• Don't save performance testing for the end of the project

Each of the items has explanation and links to more details on them (including links to three difference object caching applications - ion cube, alternative PHP cache, turck MMCache).

In this new post, Justin Silverton shares a few helpful hints for creating high performance applications in PHP:

• use multi resultset queries to your database rather than many small ones
• page/object caching
• gzip compression
• tune your web server
• Don't save performance testing for the end of the project

Each of the items has explanation and links to more details on them (including links to three difference object caching applications - ion cube, alternative PHP cache, turck MMCache).

Ilia Alshanetsky has posted the announcement about the release of the latest Release Candidate for the upcoming PHP 5.2.x series - PHP 5.2.1 RC3.

Since the last release, there are over 20 different bug fixes resolving some annoying engine issues such as the tempval leak inside foreach(). We do not anticipate any regressions to be introduced by this RC, but I would still like to ask everyone to take a few minutes and test it against their code base. If you come across any issues please report them at http://bugs.php.net/.

You can download these latest files here:

• Bzipped version
• Gzipped version

Depending on how stable things run with this release, it might be the last Release Candidate for the series. A final release might be coming soon - so get out there and run those tests!

Ilia Alshanetsky has posted the announcement about the release of the latest Release Candidate for the upcoming PHP 5.2.x series - PHP 5.2.1 RC3.

Since the last release, there are over 20 different bug fixes resolving some annoying engine issues such as the tempval leak inside foreach(). We do not anticipate any regressions to be introduced by this RC, but I would still like to ask everyone to take a few minutes and test it against their code base. If you come across any issues please report them at http://bugs.php.net/.

You can download these latest files here:

• Bzipped version
• Gzipped version

Depending on how stable things run with this release, it might be the last Release Candidate for the series. A final release might be coming soon - so get out there and run those tests!