Optimising the Zend Framework

My tips for faster ZF (try from top to bottom):

Optimize include path

• zend path first
• models next
• rest at the end

Use PHP 5.5 with OPCache enabled [NEW]

• I can't stress this enough
• gains around 50%

Cache table metadata

• should be cached even if no other caching is needed
• one of our application performance improved by ~30% on Oracle server ;)

Favour viewHelpers over using action() view helper

• create view helper that access your model
• or pass only the data from model and format them with view helpers

Use classmap autoloader

• since ZF1.11
• preferably with stripped require_once calls

Minimize path stacks

• there are a lot of path stacks in ZF
  • form elements
  • view helpers
  • action helpers
• each path stack lookup means stat call = performance loss
• default classes are more and more expensive with every path on stack

Strip require_once

• strip require_once from Zend's classes in favour of autoloading using find & sed

Favour render() over partial() view helper

• no new view instance is created
• you need to set variables outside the rendered view scope, inside the main view!
• you can also replace partialLoop() with foreach + render()

Cache anything possible

• small chunks that require lot of work and change seldomly (like dynamic menus)
• use profiler to find low-hanging fruit
  • what you think is slow may not really be so slow
• cache everything that can have cache set statically
  • see manual - Zend_Locale::setCache(), Zend_Currency::setCache(), Zend_Db_Table::setDefaultMetadataCache(), configs...

Never use view helper action() or action helper actionStack()

• Never use them unless 100% needed - for example for complicated data output, but mind the performance loss they pose
• They create whole new dispatch loop and are performance killers!

Disable viewRenderer

• take care of view rendering yourself

Try my superlimunal plugin

• it merges included classes to one long file to minimize stat calls
• get if from GitHub
  • it's port from ZF2 version from EDP
  • but beware - it's not tested in production yet, use with care
• measure performance gain
  • there was a loss for me on slow HDD and all ZF classes in it
  • try minimizing it with strip whitespace function

Server-side file minification

• It makes sense for really big files - HDD is always the bottleneck
• Even micro-optimization works fine sometimes
  • classmap with all ZF classes' paths is HUGE, striping whitespace and replacing long variables with $a and $b brought performance gain when having "dry" opcode cache and HDD under pressure.

Any opcode cache is of course a must have ;) (APC, ZendOptimizer, etc.)

APC will help no matter what sort of stack you're running on. Any sort of OPcode caching will.

In terms of speeding up your application, the first step is to profile it. Use Xdebug to generate a cachegrind report and then use something like kcachegrind or webgrind to interpret it.

From working with Zend Framework, here are some pain points I typically find:

• Config files are pretty intensive to compute. once you have the final config object, cache it!
• File includes are really expensive, try and get them down to a minimum. If you're opening files a lot for reflection based stuff, cache the output there.
• Database calls can be expensive, but are typically not the bears in the room unless they're central tasks.

Page level caching will help tremendously. Anywhere where you dont need fresh data, cache it.

Past that its less of a Zend Framework or a server issue and it starts being architectural in nature. Can you farm off intensive tasks asynchronously? Sometimes it's not worth optimising something, but it is worth changing user perception to feel faster.

Amusing thought, the other day i backspaced over $i++ to replace it with ++$i. It's technically faster, but I'm sure the time it took me to do that will never be regained in the programs lifetime. You have to draw the line somewhere :)