Juozas Kaziukenas has posted the third part of his series looking at the powerful combination of Zend Framework and the Doctrine ORM layer.

During last two months I spent massive amount of time tweaking Doctrine ORM framework and making it to perform as fast as possible (as you might have noticed from my never ending tweets). This post is devoted to performance and efficiency, with practical tips & tricks how to reduce memory usage, make it work faster and save resources.

He's broken it up into two main parts with points underneath:

• Speed including a look at hydrators, DQL and optimization
• Memory usage and how you can optimize things that seem simple and some recommendations of tools you can use to resolve some of the trouble spots.

Brandon Savage has posted a response to a recent set of benchmarks as run comparing ASP.NET and PHP's processing speeds.

But benchmarks, for all their decision-making aid, fail under the best of circumstances for one simple reason: they're not real life. Never more is this true than in Joe Stagner's blog post on whether Windows or Linux, and PHP or ASP was faster. [...] Benchmarks come loaded with all sorts of problems. It doesn't matter if it's Microsoft doing them or Apple doing them; they don't mimic real-world conditions, and any number of factors affect how the benchmarks are rendered.

Keeping these things in mind, Brandon looks at some of the issues he found with how the benchamrks were run, the largest of which was comparing the ASP.NET results (with byte code caching) to a PHP install without APC enabled.

The DooPHP framework has officially laid their claim on being one of the "fastest MVC based PHP frameworks available" with features like URI routing, RESTful API support, ORM support and a flexible license.

DooPHP is a rapid development framework for PHP using commonly known design patterns like MVC and ORM, reduces development costs and helps developers write less code. The framework itself is designed with main focus on its core performance rather than the wide range of features. It is for those who need a more structured project but do not wish to spend much time on learning a framework or a new language.

Features included in the framework are things like: internationalization support, templating, logging/profiling, E_STRICT compliance and being "Ajax friendly". If you're interested in seeing just how fast the framework is in comparison, check out their benchmarks.

They seem a little bit suspicious, though, in comparison to some other numbers generated by the Yii framework project.

NETTUTS.com has offered three quick tips of how you can use PHP to speed up your site (and no, its not PHP micro-optimizations this time).

These days, with broadband connections the norm, we don't need to worry as much about internet speeds or the filesize of our pages. However, that's not to say that we still shouldn't do so. If you wish to reduce the load times on your server, decrease the number of HTTP requests, and go that extra bit for your visitors, there are a few techniques that you can use. This tutorial covers a number of PHP tricks, including caching and compression.

Most of their three tricks don't even involve modifying your PHP code - here's the list:

• Combining several CSS files into one before pushing it out to the browser (amalgamation)
• Removing excess whitespace (sometimes substantial) from your HTML and CSS before sending
• Caching the output of your application with PHP to keep the load down

Right along with some of the other posts about the "best practices" that Google recently post, the PHP group has also responded to dispel some of the recommendations Google gives.

With regards to the new article posted at http://code.google.com/ speed/articles/optimizing-php.html, all of the advice in it is completely incorrect. We at the PHP team would like to offer some thoughts aimed at debunking these claims, which the author has clearly not verified.

The group through each of the five things Google recommends and tells why they are incorrect including the fact that, while some of the recommendations might have been true back in PHP3, they aren't at all true of the current PHP5 releases.

As a follow up to a previous list of eight things you can do to speed up your CakePHP applications, Matt Curry has added one more to the list today.

I somehow completely failed to mention the whole $uses/ClassRegistry/loadModel/chained models thing in my 8 Ways to Speed Up CakePHP Apps post.

He talks about chained models and the $uses array you can define in your controller to set them up. Once loaded, you can chain the objects for the models together and make compound requests. Of course, if you're looking for speed, you want to keep these down to a minimum:

Having one or two extra models in your controller's $uses probably isn't going to kill your app. I added one extra model to my test app and there was about a 4% increase in how long the page took. Then I added seven extra models and there was approximately a 40% increase. So roughly 4-6% for every additional model.

Fabien Potencier has posted another article about dependency injection and the Symfony service container. In this part of the series he looks at the "need for speed" - reducing the need for the XML/YAML parsing of the same information on every request via a new tool, the PHP dumper.

With the introduction of the XML and YAML configuration files, you might have became a bit sceptic about the performance of the container itself. Even if services are lazy loading, reading a bunch of XML or YAML files on each request and creating objects by using introspection is probably not very efficient in PHP. [...] How can you have the best of both world? That's quite simply. The Symfony Dependency Injection component provides yet another built-in dumper: a PHP dumper.

The dumper lets you convert the service container into regular PHP code (expanding the container's functionality out into a Container class based on the XML/YAML configuration.

Noupe.com has posted a few tips to help you get the most out of your WordPress installation - everything from basic tweaks to database optimization.

Performance is a key factor for any successful website. And since WordPress is becoming more popular than ever, it will only be at its best when raised in the proper conditions. Here are a few things to try if you find that your WordPress site is not performing as well as it could be due to high traffic or hidden issues you don't know about.

Here's their list of tips and tricks:

• Upgrade to latest WordPress release
• Remove unnecessary Plugins & upgrade current ones
• Minimize PHP and database queries
• Optimize and Repair your Database from myPhpAdmin
• Use Reliable image hosting service
• Optimize your images with this great tool
• Install WP Super Cache Plugin
• PHP Speedy WP
• WP CSS
• DB Cache
• Speed up access to your favorite frameworks via the AJAX Libraries API
• Display page loading time + number of queries
• Optimize DB

Matt Curry has a new post to his blog listing a few ways that you can help get the most out of your CakePHP application's performance.

It's a not so well kept secret that CakePHP is slow. What isn't well know is that this is done by design. I could get in a lot of trouble by revealing this, but I'm willing to take that risk. [...] Every time you use one of the tips in this article it's one less gold chain on the neck of a Cake developer.

Here's his list of eight tips:

• Set Debug to 0
• Cache your slow queries/web service requests/whatever
• View Caching
• HTML Caching
• APC (or some other opcode cache)
• Persistent Models
• Store The Persistent Cache in APC
• Speed Up Reverse Routing

Some of the tips are CakePHP specific, but several of them (the caching) can be useful no matter what sort of application you're using - framework or not.

The TechFounder blog has a few general tips you can use to help your web pages go a bit faster:

As it might be expected, there are several techniques to optimize the delivery of web pages. The Exceptional Performance guide by Yahoo is a great resource for a multitude of optimizations practices, including specifically two techniques which I will address in this article - script minifcation and concatenation.

Suggestions include reducing total request counts and minification of external libraries via the Minify tool.