The SitePoint PHP blog has posted the latest tutorial in their series creating a simple image gallery application with a focus on performance. In this latest article they cover the use of Varnish for output and page caching.

According to Pingdom.com, a company focused on web performance, in 2012 Varnish was already famous among the world’s top websites for its capacity to speed up web delivery.

[...] Although there are other solutions that also shine, Varnish is still a go-to solution that can dramatically improve website speed, reduce the strain on the web application server’s CPU, and even serve as a protection layer from DDoS attacks. KeyCDN recommends deploying it on the origin server stack.

Varnish can sit on a dedicated machine in case of more demanding websites, and make sure that the origin servers aren’t affected by the flood of requests.

The article starts by explaining a bit about how Varnish (and caching in general) works to help improve the performance for the end user. It also goes through some of the basics feature of Varnish including threaded executions, extensibility and its domain-specific language. The tutorial then walks you through the installation of Varnish on a linux-based machine and shares some example stats showing the difference between normal requests and when Varnish is enabled for the image gallery application.

On the Delicious Brains site they've posted a tutorial that provides some helpful tips and tricks for optimizing your SQL queries on your WordPress sites with the help of some basic techniques and software to analyze your current use.

With dynamic database-driven websites like WordPress, you might still have one problem on your hands: database queries slowing down your site.

In this post, I’ll take you through how to identify the queries causing bottlenecks, how to understand the problems with them, along with quick fixes and other approaches to speed things up. I’ll be using an actual query we recently tackled that was slowing things down on the customer portal of deliciousbrains.com.

They then walk through some of the methods for locating the queries that could be causing issues including the use of the QueryMonitor plugin and the MySQL slow query log. They provide some tips for understanding what makes the query slow and how to use the MySQL Workbench tool to determine the structure of the database and look for optimizations. Finally they get into some of the things they did to solve their own issue including adding caching, better understanding the need of the query and "thinking outside the box" with indexes and normalization.

Derick Rethans has a post to his site covering some optimizations around PHP's "switch" handling and how it has changed in the upcoming PHP 7.2 release.

PHP 7.2 is around the corner soon, and comes with many optimisations. Many new optimisations are implemented in opcache, but some others are implemented in PHP itself. One optimisation that falls in the latter category is an optimisation of the switch/case construct.

He then gets into the differences between the previous functionality and how it has changed, mostly in how the language handles the evaluation of the "case" statements. He include a flow diagram of how the pre-7.2 flow happened and how, with PHP 7.2, a "jump table" is used to optimize the process. This table allows PHP to perform a lookup on the value rather than evaluating equality (like in an if) on string values. If it's not a string the same evaluation happens as before, however.

On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a tutorial posted showing how to optimize your MySQL handling with the help of the Beaver query logger package and the details it provides.

Clients with an existing application sometimes ask me to fix bugs, improve efficiency by speeding up the application, or add a new feature to some existing software. The first stage of this is researching the original code – so-called reverse engineering. With SQL databases, it is not always immediately obvious which SQL queries MySQL executed – especially if these queries were generated by a framework or some kind of external library. In this article, I will talk specifically about MySQL and present a common optimization use case which might come in handy if you run into a similar problem one day.

He shows how to update your MySQL installation to log all queries out to the log location of your choice. This log can then, in turn, be parsed by the Beaver package and provide details about what's happening in the query and where it could be optimized. The article also provides a more "real world" example of a query happening in a Yii2 application resulting in a large number of queries being generated. He shows how to update the query handling to make the loading more efficient (through joins rather than individual queries) and what the resulting statement looked like.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a tutorial showing you how to optimize how your application works with assets with Munee.

Munee is a n asset management tool which can compile LESS, SCSS, or CoffeeScript, manipulate images, minify CSS and JS, and cache assets on the server and client on the fly. It works with PHP 5.3 and newer versions.

In this tutorial, we will learn how Munee makes it easy to include assets in templates, how to install it, how it works and how to use it. Munee is another way to avoid NodeJS in asset management of PHP apps.

He starts the article with a few reasons why you'd want to use Munee to manage your application's assets including automatic minification and both server and client side cache handling. He covers a bit about how it works and what it does to cache assets via simple HTTP headers. He then gets into the actual installation of the tool, the code needed to run it in your system (a one-line call) and how to have the server rewrite all the requests back to the waiting PHP file. He shows how to compile different asset types including SCSS, LESS and CoffeScript files as well as minifying Javascript and CSS. Munee also includes an on-the-fly image resize handler that will also cache the results. Finally he talks about how you can use it to combine assets and briefly about the API the library provides for some other functionality.

You may have been using relational databases in your PHP applications for a long time (PHP loves MySQL after all) but you might not have ever dug deep enough to understand how those databases work internally. In this detailed tutorial from Coding Geek they dive way in and cover everything from the basics out to complex sorting, management components and query handling.

When it comes to relational databases, I can’t help thinking that something is missing. They’re used everywhere. [...] you can google by yourself “how does a relational database work” to see how few results there are. [...] Are relational databases too old and too boring to be explained outside of university courses, research papers and books?

As a developer, I HATE using something I don’t understand. And, if databases have been used for 40 years, there must be a reason. [...] Over the years, I’ve spent hundreds of hours to really understand these weird black boxes I use every day. Relational Databases are very interesting because they’re based on useful and reusable concepts. If understanding a database interests you but you’ve never had the time or the will to dig into this wide subject, you should like this article.

He covers a wide range of topics during the post:

• O(1)) vs O(n2) (or how data sets are handled based on size)
• Array, Tree and Hash table
• Global overview (structure of the database system and its pieces)
• Query manager
• Statistics (and optimizing storage of the data)
• Data manager
• Deadlock
• Logging

Each of these topics comes with a lot of explanation, examples of how the internals are functioning as well as diagrams to help make a bit more sense. If you've ever really wanted to know how that database you use functions, this is definitely the article to check out.

On the Bigcommerce Engineering blog there's a new post sharing a few tips for memory optimization in your PHP applications. This includes tips you can implement at a code level without too many changes to the server or the need for external services.

Lately, I’ve been working on optimizing the memory of some of our backend PHP applications and wanted to share some of the tricks that I have come across, especially dealing with large set of data using PHP.

Each of their tips includes code to illustrate the technique:

• Always cap your internal in-memory caching
• Use layered caching
• (Freeing) DB Resources
• Free large blocks of memory

Some of the examples include output from the scripts showing the reduction (or non-growth) of the peak memory usage of the script.

In this recent post to the /r/php subreddit on Reddit.com, AfterNite wonders why it's important to measure the "requests per second" that a framework handles (or if it is at all).

I have been using Laravel 4 for a while now. Recently I saw a benchmark here (http://blog.a-way-out.net/blog/2015/03/27/php-framework-benchmark/). There are many frameworks that were compared and compared to phalcon the requests per second seem crappy. Hearing that zend is powerful and primarily aimed at businesses how is it that a few hundred requests per second is good? I can't wrap my head around why people are using frameworks such as Zend, Laravel 5 and Symfony.

The comments on the post mention things like:

• taking benchmarks "with a grain of salt"
• How it relates to optimization
• Wondering what the mean requests-per-second would be
• What effect a datasource has on performance
• The relation between performance and ease of use

You can read the full post or leave an opinion of your own on the full post.

On PHPBuilder.com today they have a new article posted sharing a few different methods you can use to do backups of your (MySQL) database and a few handy tricks/tools you can use to optimize it as well.

Every computer system has a backup. Nevertheless, the number of problems caused by a lack of a recent backup is huge. One of the reasons for that may be the fact that the backup process is not entirely automated. So, let's see how to automate the database backup process in PHP.

There's three recommendations for the (simple) database backup that can produce a file of the current database contents - mysqldump, mysqlhostcopy and a "SELECT INTO OUTFILE" statement. On the optimization size they suggest mysqlcheck, an OPTIMIZE query to help find trouble spots. There's a script included at the end showing how these methods can be combined into a simple PHP script, something that can easily be dropped into a cron job to perform every so often.

In this new episode of the "Lately in PHP" podcast, Manuel Lemos and Gustavo Lopes (a core PHP developer) talk about some of the latest enhancements in the PHP 5.4.x releases.

The PHP 5.4 includes 7 main optimizations that made PHP work more efficiently in terms of the speed and memory usage efficiency. That is the main topic discussed in episode 25 of the Lately in PHP podcast on which Manuel Lemos received Gustavo Lopes, a PHP core developer.

You can either listen to this latest episode through the in-page player, by subscribing to the blog's feed. Additionally, you can also watch the video of the interview as recorded via Google Hangouts.