PHP performance

Question

What can I do to increase the performance/speed of my PHP scripts without installing software on my servers?

Answer 1

Profile. Profile. Profile. I'm not sure if there is anything out there for PHP, but it should be simple to write a little tool to insert profiling information in your code. You will want to profile function times and SQL query times.

So where you have a function:

function foo($stuff) {
    ...
    return ...;
}

I would change it to:

function foo($stuff) {
    trace_push_fn('foo');
    ...
    trace_pop_fn('foo');
    return ...;
}

(This is one of those cases where multiple returns in a function become a hinderance.)

And SQL:

function bar($stuff) {
    trace_push_fn('bar');

    $query = ...;
    trace_push_sql($query);
    mysql_query($query);
    trace_pop_sql($query);

    trace_pop_fn('bar');
    return ...;
}

In the end, you can generate a full trace of the program execution and use all sorts of techniques to identify your bottlenecks.

Answer 2

1) Use latest version of PHP

The core team is working hard on improving the performance of PHP in every version.

2) Use a bytecode cache

Since PHP 5.5 a bytecode cache has been added to PHP named OPcache. Using OPcache can make a huge difference especially since PHP 7. It receives improvements in every PHP version and might even get a JIT implementation in the future.

3) Profiling

While developing profiling gives you great insight what exactly is happening. This helps a lot finding bottlenecks in your code.

One of the most used tools is XHProf but is not officially supported anymore and has issues with PHP >= 7. An alternative when you want to profile PHP >= 7 is Tideways which is a fork of XHProf.

Answer 3

You can optimized the code with two basic things:

Optimizing PHP associated library and server

Go through https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-optimize-apache-web-server-performance Or

You can use profiling tool like xhprof to view what part of your code can by optimized and here is the link to follow: http://michaelsanford.com/compiling-xhprof-for-php-5-4/

Optimizing your code using code profiler and code analyzer

You need to install Netbeans in order to use this plugin. Here are the steps you need to follow:

1) Open NetBeans then select option from menu bar Tools > Plugin. Then search plug-in name "phpcsmd" in the available plug-in tab and install it from there.

2) Now open the terminal and be there as the super user by typing command "sudo su".

3) Install PEAR library (if it is not installed) into your system by running following commands into your terminal

a) wget http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar
b) php go-pear.phar

As we need this for the installation of further addons.

4) Then run the command

"pear config-set auto_discover 1"

This will be used to set auto discover the path "true" for the required plug-ins. So they get install to the desired location automatically.

5) Then run below command to install PHP code sniffer.

"pear install --alldeps pear/PHP_CodeSniffer"

6) Now to install the PHP Mess Detector by running following command

"pear install --alldeps phpmd/PHP_PMD"

If you get the error like "invalid package name/package file "phpmd/PHP_PMD"" while installing this module. You need to use this "pear channel-discover pear.phpmd.org" command to get rid of this error. After this command you can run the above command again to install Mess detector.

7) Now to install the PHP Depend by running following command

"pear install --alldeps pdepend/PHP_Depend"

8) Now install the PHP Copy Paste Detector by running following command

"pear install --alldeps phpunit/phpcpd"

9) Then run the command

"pear config-set auto_discover 0"

This will be used to set auto discover path "false".

10) Then open net beans and follow the path Tools>Options>PHP>PHPCSMD

Answer 4

The ones I can think of...

• Loop invariants are always a good one to watch.

• Write E_STRICT and E_NOTICE compliant code, particularly if you are logging errors.

• Avoid the @ operator.

• Absolute paths for requires and includes.

• Use strpos, str_replace etc. instead of regular expressions whenever possible.

Then there's a bunch of other methods that might work, but probably wont give you much benefit.

Answer 5

Rasmus Lerdorf gave some good tips in his recent presentation "Simple is Hard" at FrOSCon '08. If you are using a bytecode cache (and you really should be using one), include path misses hurt a lot, so optimize your require/require_once.

Answer 6

Really consider using XDebug profiler: it helps with checking how much a certain function is being executed against what you would have expected.

I try to decrease instructions while improving code readability by replacing logic with array-lookups when appropriate. It's what Jeff Atwood wrote in [The Best Code is No Code At All][1].

• Also, avoid loops inside another loop, and nested if/else statements.
• Short functions. Sometimes a lot of code does not need to be executed when the result-value is already known.

• Unnecessary testing:

  if (count($array) === 0) return;

  can also be written as:

  if (! $array) return;

  Another function-call eliminated!

  [1]: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000878.html"The Best Code is No Code At All"