In a recent post to his blog Anson Cheung guides you through another tool that can help you optimize your web applications - using YSlow for the frontend to detect trouble spots early (whether they're actually caused by the frontend or not).

He goes through the thirteen rules to help improve your website's performance including:

• Make fewer HTTP requests
• Gzip components
• Make JS and CSS external
• Remove duplicate scripts
• Configure ETags

For more information about the YSlow extension (available for Firefox, Chrome, Opera and mobile devices), check out the project's page on Yahoo's Developer section (including ten more rules it checks).

In a new tutorial posted to the PHPRiot.com site today Quentin Zervaas shows you some of the steps he's taken to improve the response time and overall speed of his site to help with the ever-increasing load.

Google have recently announced that the speed of a web site is now used as a factor in determining its search rank. This is great news for the skillful PHP developer, since it allows you to gain an advantage over those not as dedicated to their art.

He decided on the Google Page Speed an YSlow plugins for Firebug as a benchmarking platform to test the speed and response time of the different parts of his site. These plugins give your site rankings and overall recommendations on what you could be doing better to help its performance.

He talks about content delivery networks, minifying your CSS and Javascript, a method for caching generated pages for a certain length of time and gzipping your content to make it stream to the browser more effectively.

Andre Liem has posted five simple tips (part one of a two-part series) on ways to optimize your PHP applications.

After experiencing some issues with an application running the Zend Framework, I realized there were a lot of things I was not doing to optimize my application. There are simple and more complex actions you can take to speed up your application. Since time is precious, and developers with an expertise on optimization are not always available, I’ve split this post into two sections (simple and more advanced). This post focuses on the simple part.

His simpler suggestions include using the YSlow extension in Firefox, minification of Javascript and CSS, merging CSS/JS requests, using gzip and avoiding CSS background images.