Posted on April 1, 2008 - by webmaster
63+ best practice to optimize PHP code performances
Today i am searching solutions for any tips and tricks about best practice to optimize PHP code performances and i found some of useful articles which you may interested with.
One of them is an old post by Reinhold Webber, a good list of consideration practice in optimizing PHP code performances.
Here are Webber’s points:
- If a method can be static, declare it static. Speed improvement is by a factor of 4.
- echo is faster than print.(* compare with list from phplens by John Lim)
- Use echo’s multiple parameters instead of string concatenation.
- Set the maxvalue for your for-loops before and not in the loop.
- Unset your variables to free memory, especially large arrays.
- Avoid magic like __get, __set, __autoload
- require_once() is expensive
- Use full paths in includes and requires, less time spent on resolving the OS paths.
- If you need to find out the time when the script started executing, $_SERVER[’REQUEST_TIME’] is preferred to time()
- See if you can use strncasecmp, strpbrk and stripos instead of regex
- str_replace is faster than preg_replace, but strtr is faster than str_replace by a factor of 4
- If the function, such as string replacement function, accepts both arrays and single characters as arguments, and if your argument list is not too long, consider writing a few redundant replacement statements, passing one character at a time, instead of one line of code that accepts arrays as search and replace arguments.
- It’s better to use select statements than multi if, else if, statements.
- Error suppression with @ is very slow.
- Turn on apache’s mod_deflate
- Close your database connections when you’re done with them
- $row[’id’] is 7 times faster than $row[id]
- Error messages are expensive
- Do not use functions inside of for loop, such as for ($x=0; $x < count($array); $x) The count() function gets called each time.
- Incrementing a local variable in a method is the fastest. Nearly the same as calling a local variable in a function.
- Incrementing a global variable is 2 times slow than a local var.
- Incrementing an object property (eg. $this->prop++) is 3 times slower than a local variable.
- Incrementing an undefined local variable is 9-10 times slower than a pre-initialized one.
- Just declaring a global variable without using it in a function also slows things down (by about the same amount as incrementing a local var). PHP probably does a check to see if the global exists.
- Method invocation appears to be independent of the number of methods defined in the class because I added 10 more methods to the test class (before and after the test method) with no change in performance.
- Methods in derived classes run faster than ones defined in the base class.
- A function call with one parameter and an empty function body takes about the same time as doing 7-8 $localvar++ operations. A similar method call is of course about 15 $localvar++ operations.
- Surrounding your string by ‘ instead of ” will make things interpret a little faster since php looks for variables inside “…” but not inside ‘…’. Of course you can only do this when you don’t need to have variables in the string.
- When echoing strings it’s faster to separate them by comma instead of dot. Note: This only works with echo, which is a function that can take several strings as arguments.
- A PHP script will be served at least 2-10 times slower than a static HTML page by Apache. Try to use more static HTML pages and fewer scripts.
- Your PHP scripts are recompiled every time unless the scripts are cached. Install a PHP caching product to typically increase performance by 25-100% by removing compile times.
- Cache as much as possible. Use memcached – memcached is a high-performance memory object caching system intended to speed up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. OP code caches are useful so that your script does not have to be compiled on every request
- When working with strings and you need to check that the string is either of a certain length you’d understandably would want to use the strlen() function. This function is pretty quick since it’s operation does not perform any calculation but merely return the already known length of a string available in the zval structure (internal C struct used to store variables in PHP). However because strlen() is a function it is still somewhat slow because the function call requires several operations such as lowercase & hashtable lookup followed by the execution of said function. In some instance you can improve the speed of your code by using an isset() trick.
Ex.if (strlen($foo) < 5) { echo "Foo is too short"; }vs.
if (!isset($foo{5})) { echo "Foo is too short"; }Calling isset() happens to be faster then strlen() because unlike strlen(), isset() is a language construct and not a function meaning that it’s execution does not require function lookups and lowercase. This means you have virtually no overhead on top of the actual code that determines the string’s length.
- When incrementing or decrementing the value of the variable $i++ happens to be a tad slower then ++$i. This is something PHP specific and does not apply to other languages, so don’t go modifying your C or Java code thinking it’ll suddenly become faster, it won’t. ++$i happens to be faster in PHP because instead of 4 opcodes used for $i++ you only need 3. Post incrementation actually causes in the creation of a temporary var that is then incremented. While pre-incrementation increases the original value directly. This is one of the optimization that opcode optimized like Zend’s PHP optimizer. It is a still a good idea to keep in mind since not all opcode optimizers perform this optimization and there are plenty of ISPs and servers running without an opcode optimizer.
- Not everything has to be OOP, often it is too much overhead, each method and object call consumes a lot of memory.
- Do not implement every data structure as a class, arrays are useful, too
- Don’t split methods too much, think, which code you will really re-use
- You can always split the code of a method later, when needed
- Make use of the countless predefined functions
- If you have very time consuming functions in your code, consider writing them as C extensions
- Profile your code. A profiler shows you, which parts of your code consumes how many time. The Xdebug debugger already contains a profiler. Profiling shows you the bottlenecks in overview
- mod_gzip which is available as an Apache module compresses your data on the fly and can reduce the data to transfer up to 80%
- Excellent Article about optimizing php by John Lim
As Reihold Webber pointed to a post from John Lim (found this article copied without state the source here), then i investigate further and truly that is an excellent best practice tutorial for optimizing the php code performance, covered almost all aspects from low level webserver configuration, PHP configuration, coding styling, and performace comparisson as well.
Another good practice for better php performance as written in cluesheet.com are:
- Do use single quotes over double quotes.
- Do use switch over lots of if statements
- Do avoid testing loop conditionals with function tests every iteration eg. for($i=0;i<=count($x);$i++){…
- Do use foreach for looping collections/arrays. PHP4 items are byval, greater than PHP5 items are byref
- Do consider using the Singleton Method when creating complex PHP classes.
- Do use POST over GET for all values that will wind up in the database for TCP/IP packet performance reasons.
- Do use ctype_alnum,ctype_alpha and ctype_digit over regular expression to test form value types for performance reasons.
- Do use full file paths in production environment over basename/fileexists/open_basedir to avoid performance hits for the filesystem having to hunt through the file path. Once determined, serialize and/or cache path values in a $_SETTINGS array. $_SETTINGS["cwd"]=cwd(./);
- Do use require/include over require_once/include_once to ensure proper opcode caching.
- Do use tmpfile or tempnam for creating temp files/filenames
- Do use a proxy to access web services (XML or JSOM) on foreign domains using XMLHTTP to avoid cross-domain errors. eg. foo.com<–>XMLHTTP<–>bar.com
- Do use error_reporting (E_ALL); during debug.
- Do set Apache allowoverride to “none” to improve Apache performance in accessing files/directories.
- Do use a fast fileserver for serving static content (thttpd). static.mydomain.com, dynamic.mydomain.com
- Do serialize application settings like paths into an associative array and cache or serialize that array after first execution.
- Do use PHP output control buffering for page caching of heavilty accessed pages
- Do use PDO prepare over native db prepare for statements. mysql_attr_direct_query=>1
- Do NOT use SQL wildcard select. eg. SELECT *
- Do use database logic (queries, joins, views, procedures) over loopy PHP.
- Do use shortcut syntax for SQL insers if not using PDO parameters parameters. eg. INSERT INTO MYTABLE (FIELD1,FIELD2) VALUES ((“x”,”y”),(“p”,”q”));
Another Interesting articles about optimizing php performance:
- PHP & Mysql Cache Performance Comparison
- Accelerating PHP Applications Slide presentation International PHP Conference 2004
- Caching output in PHP
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 16:55 and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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April 1, 2008
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I finally decided to write a comment on your blog. I just wanted to say good job. I really enjoy reading your posts.
Tina Russell
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April 1, 2008
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[...] 63+ best practice to optimize PHP code performances By Bali Web Designer Today i am searching solutions for any tips and tricks about best practice to optimize PHP code performances and i found some of useful articles which you may interested with. One of them is an old post by Reinhold Webber, … Freelance Web Designer Blog – http://www.chazzuka.com/blog [...]
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April 3, 2008
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63+ best practice to optimize PHP code performances…
63 Best practice optimize PHP code performance including optimize webserver configuration php configuration better code style and performance comparison…
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April 3, 2008
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@Tina Russell
Thank to the original author, i just share ‘em coz those articles has save my time and i believe can do the same to others
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April 11, 2008
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63+ Best practice optimize PHP code performance…
63+ Best practice optimize PHP code performance including optimize webserver configuration, php configuration, better code style and performance comparison…
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April 11, 2008
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Fantastic post.
Good job.
Voted for you at:
http://www.newsdots.com/tutorials/63-best-practice-optimize-php-code-performance/
http://www.topstumbles.com/how-to/63-best-practice-optimize-php-code-performance/
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April 14, 2008
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Great list, thanks!
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April 17, 2008
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Very helpful tips — I learned a lot. Thanks for taking the time to write all of those down
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April 19, 2008
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Do use switch over lots of if statements
I think you’re wrong, it’s the inverse (switch must be avoid)
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April 20, 2008
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I don’t like much of these practices.
If an optimization end in unreadable code, I pass.
I like my code to be easy to maintain, even loosing some seconds.
For example: “Methods in derived classes run faster than ones defined in the base class.”: There are methods that belongs to the base class, and methods that belong to the derived class. Period. From this point, PHP is responsible for code running slow or fast
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April 22, 2008
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Not a bad list, but my rule of thumb is that a webpage isn’t a video game, so you don’t need it to be bleeding fast. Besides, a lot of the slowness is on the browser end.
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April 24, 2008
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[...] 63 tips para optimizar tu codigo PHP [...]
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April 25, 2008
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such, a great and nice post for php developers, I learn a lot of it.
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May 5, 2008
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Some beautiful little tips there!
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May 23, 2008
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It doesn’t matter if you prefer other way of coding. These are just measured facts. If you want to boggle your mind and optimize, good. If you want cleaner slower code, good also.
But….. Optimization can result in clean code too. Once you know what it does, you will recognize it too. Putting a count() in a for loop, doesn’t read well either. Put it outside and it reads perfectly.
Resolving paths one time, can read pretty good while putting dirname(__FILE__) in front of every relative path sucks.
Code just doesn’t read like English or someone mother language. Get over it. You’ll learn to apply optimizations in a snap. And you also get insight where bottlenecks are growing.
As always, test your code. Benchmark it, stress it. Use profilers and look if it can improve your applications speed.
- Unomi -
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May 24, 2008
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[...] 多くのブログにこの記事のことが書かれているのが納得。 英語元記事 http://www.chazzuka.com/blog/?p=163 comments(0) [...]
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June 1, 2008
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These are not “best” practices. Most of these “improvements” make so little difference that it is practically impossible to measure them.
Disk-based activities may be worthwhile optimising because disks are so slow. Using full paths and avoiding errors that write to the php error log make sense but the time savings made after implementing ALL of the other suggestions throughout ALL of your code can often be eclipsed by optimising ONE SQL query.
I took a look through our MySQL slow log the other day, picked a likely looking query and saved over a day’s worth of CPU time per day after optimisation.
After you have optimised all your SQL, implement OpCode caching and your own HTML snippets caching or SQL results caching with MemCache. All of these things will save you hundreds of times more CPU time and real time than these PHP “optimisations” will save.
There is also a lot of disagreement about some of these. I have seen people doing benchmarks of echo() versus print() who have found different results on different computers. The differences ended up being less than a second after around ten million iterations so in the end they decided that it really didn’t matter anyway.
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June 6, 2008
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Thanks a lot. I learn some tips from this post.
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June 16, 2008
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Buffering was mentioned, but simply using ob_start(); at the very start of a script can save you 20%. Noting that you don’t need a ob_flush at the end, it will flush at the end of execution automagically. It’s an easy way to get free ms back off of your scipt.
Quiet a few short of 63, actually – some of the items are repeated 2, 3 times.
e.g.
Set the maxvalue for your for-loops before and not in the loop.
Do not use functions inside of for loop, such as for ($x=0; $x < count($array); $x) The count() function gets called each time.
Do avoid testing loop conditionals with function tests every iteration eg. for($i=0;i<=count($x);$i++){…
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June 20, 2008
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These optimizations may are not suitable to an everyday application, but they can make the difference in a library or framework, in places where performance is critical.
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June 24, 2008
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63+ Best practice optimize PHP code performance…
Excellent PHP optimization tips…
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July 3, 2008
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Hi,
I liked your short notes very much. It’s equivalent to reading whole book. Great job. Thank you very much.
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July 15, 2008
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[...] Silahkan baca artikelnya di sini dan di sini. [...]
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July 31, 2008
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Thank you, great article for skimming over
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August 15, 2008
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[...] Chazzuka gibts 63 best practices, die man als PHP-Entwickler unbedingt beachten sollte um guten und [...]
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August 23, 2008
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Die 63 besten Tipps zur PHP performance Optimierung…
Umfangreiche Liste mit vielen Tipps und Tricks zur PHP Performance Optimierung….
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September 2, 2008
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Although I agree with the obsessive nature of this post, I disagree with it as a matter of practice.
The whole point of having a higher level language is to make room for different programming styles. Yes, some ways may be faster, but are they more practical? Not always. Is 1/10000th of a second really that important or noticeable to the user? No it isn’t.
In reality the goal is to create readable and understandable code – to the programmer and others. This is why there are options for conditionals, loops, and so on. If you prefer to write concise, as-fast-as-possible code, then you can. If you prefer to write more elegant and understandable, easy-to-read-without-comments code, then you can.
That’s the beauty of using PHP.
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September 15, 2008
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[...] 63 Best practice optimize PHP code performance Today i am searching solutions for any tips and tricks about best practice to optimize PHP code performances and i found some of useful articles which you may interested with. [...]
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September 22, 2008
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All-in-all, this article is pretty useful. I think anybody reading it should keep in mind, however, to use these optimizations to their advantage.
You mention that the usage of magic methods results in poorer performance. This makes sense since PHP has to figure out exactly what you’re trying to do. But magic methods can make code more readable and editable, so there’s a tradeoff.
Really, what you want to do is use the optimizations listed here that are useful to you. If performance isn’t of the utmost importance to you, then you don’t need to go hog-wild with these, but if you really need to increase performance, just take a look at these points and see which ones you can implement that will help you out.
Optimizations can always happen later too. Well, some can, anyway.
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September 28, 2008
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tips yg sgt berguna. sumber awal nya dari mana ya ?
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September 28, 2008
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Di article-nya sendiri sudah di state sourcenya dimana
, coba baca ulang deh hehehe
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October 13, 2008
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[...] Best practice zum Optimieren der Performence von PHP Eine nette kleine Sammlung von Tips zu steigerung dere Performence von PHP ist auf jedenfall einen Blick wert. [...]
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October 24, 2008
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[...] http://www.chazzuka.com/blog/?p=163 [...]
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November 13, 2008
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Спасибо за пост! Добавил блог в RSS-ридер, теперь читать буду регулярно..
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November 26, 2008
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[...] http://www.chazzuka.com/blog/?p=163 http://reinholdweber.com/?p=3 http://phplens.com/lens/php-book/optimizing-debugging-php.php [...]
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December 19, 2008
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22
Hi,
Gr8 job. Thank you very much.
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January 19, 2009
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amazing post))
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May 17, 2009
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Are all these best practices of optimizing PHP code are up-to-date. I can see that the last update on this page was April 2008. If they are still they are really amazing. can I use these tips and try it on NUSphere PHP Profiler for code performance? anyone can give me tips on this, i would be grateful.
Peter
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June 19, 2009
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[...] 63+ best practice to optimize PHP code performances [...]
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June 21, 2009
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I’ve heard a lot about PHP code optimization, read a lot of articles, but this one is very complete!
Great job
greetings from Brazil.
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June 23, 2009
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[...] 63+ best practice to optimize PHP code performances [...]
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August 1, 2009
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This is an excellent compilation. The purported benefits of some of these tips are arguable at best but generally these tips were spot on, at least in my experience. I did notice however that for one of the tips `echo` was referred to a function. It actually isn’t a function, its a language construct like `die` and `exit`. print() however is a function.
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September 1, 2009
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About “$row[’id’] is 7 times faster than $row[id]” – $row[id] syntax is invalid from a “common sense” point of view, and since the beginning of my ‘journey’ with PHP (about 2001) I keep wondering why parser issues only notice about this.
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September 14, 2009
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Not a bad list, but my rule of thumb is that a webpage isn’t a video game, so you don’t need it to be bleeding fast. Besides, a lot of the slowness is on the browser end.
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September 14, 2009
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You mention that the usage of magic methods results in poorer performance. This makes sense since PHP has to figure out exactly what you’re trying to do. But magic methods can make code more readable and editable, so there’s a tradeoff.
Really, what you want to do is use the optimizations listed here that are useful to you. If performance isn’t of the utmost importance to you, then you don’t need to go hog-wild with these, but if you really need to increase performance, just take a look at these points and see which ones you can implement that will help you out.
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December 29, 2009
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Just a little note: the “++x” vs “x++” operator is NOT language-specific and does in fact work for C and C++ and Java as well. In fact I first came across this one (measured to be up to 3-4 times faster too!) when I was working on some C++ code.
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January 5, 2010
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Thanks for sharing. Really great
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January 9, 2010
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[...] 63+ best practice to optimize PHP code performances [...]
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January 22, 2010
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[...] 63+ best practice to optimize PHP code performance [...]
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January 25, 2010
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Great list of tips.. these small-2 points are very helpful.
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February 11, 2010
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Hi, thanks for collecting this list.
But did you even look at it before publishing? Some of that stuff is dead wrong or just a myth. Several are duplicates.
I will go through the list and publish a article that will show what is wrong/right.
Regards.
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February 14, 2010
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The following 2 statements are NOT logically the same. !isset($foo{4}) should be used instead.
if (strlen($foo) < 5) { echo "Foo is too short"; }
if (!isset($foo{5})) { echo "Foo is too short"; }
However, stick to something easy to read and use the first statement. It's quite obvious that the second method is prone to error… as you so ably proved!
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May 23, 2010
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hi there first class little journal you got here
I work with the same web theme on my own blog yet unfortunately for whatever reason why it looks to load quicker on this web site despite the fact that this blog has a little more content. Are you operating any individual plug ins or widgets which will quicken it up? If you might be able to give the plug ins so that I might use these in my personal site so twilight new moon users could watch twilight new moon online trailers and films more easily I’d personally always be pleased – cheers ahead of time 