Zend Optimizer Installed
Continuing with the saga of trying to make sure that our site is as optimized as it can be and addressing performance issues, we had the Zend Optimizer installed today. For this one, I hired a professional to get in there and make the install. I was sure I could do it, but I don't know enough to troubleshoot problems if they arise, and it just so happened that they arose for the contractor. Lucky for me he knows exactly what he is doing. Short of the site acting weird for about 5 minutes, there was no harm done.
So the Zend Optimizer is a free, open-source application from Zend software. Zend created the scripting engine that powers PHP, and they have a bunch of additional products to help with optimizing PHP applications and server loads. The optimizer (apparently) goes through and optimizes compiled PHP scripts to make them run better. Rumor has it that it can speed up a website by a couple of hundred percent.
Actually, it's probably more accurate to say that the more inneficient code that you have in your PHP application, the bigger the performance boost. This is because the optimizer actually rewrites bad code into good code. If I know my PHP programming skills right, we should see a big performance gain.
The next step to increasing our sites performance is to address the "bad code" that needs to be rewritten. That is a large task considering that it means going back through the entire site, and rebuilding the application with our performance goals in mind. In the meantime, I may also look at some other tools like Zend Caching, which will cache frequently repeated PHP script results so that the script does not have to run every time, but rather relies on the cache for better performance. We'll see, I'm not sure how that works with the scripts. There are parts of each page (such as the left side navigation) that would be great to cache. However, there are other parts of the same pages (the advertisements, for example) that we do not want to cache, because we want them served up each time a request is made.
I'm sure there is a middle ground somewhere, and I will still be on the lookout for ways to make our website work better and load faster. Ideally our traffic will get so high that I have to face these issues again. If nothing else, I still have a few things to try before getting drastic and rewriting the PHP application.
This post is filed under Developers' Corner and has the following keyword tags: zend, php.
