Whether you’re an independent web site operator or the manager of a large web serving farm, you must constantly look for ways to optimize your environment to keep costs low and boost overall performance. Indeed, optimization has recently become something of a crusade for businesses, as many search for ways to yield even the slightest improvements in profit.
Whether you’re an independent web site operator or the manager of a large web serving farm, you must constantly look for ways to optimize your environment to keep costs low and boost overall performance. Indeed, optimization has recently become something of a crusade for businesses, as many search for ways to yield even the slightest improvements in profit.
Typically, when you deploy optimizations — whether it’s code, new systems, or a database — you’re forced to choose two of better, cheaper, and faster. For example, you could choose to deploy more application servers to distribute load across disparate hosts, but the equipment costs would be high. Or, you can rewrite your application code, to take advantage of newer features in your processing engine, but the associated delay and expense might not make the overhaul worthwhile. Then again, you could outsource the entire optimization project to a team of mercenary consultants, albeit at an astronomical price.
Of course, optimizations have theoretical returns that must be considered as well. While deploying additional hosts to handle load and increase performance does net increased performance, the gains are only linear: double the hosts and requisite network gear, and you double the capacity of your system. To achieve increased performance on an exponential scale, you need to resort to code optimization.
Fortunately, if you’re running PHP web applications, there are a number of options to improve application performance very easily and very cheaply. In fact, some improvements are virtually free: free as…
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