9. External Performance Tunings
IN ANY TUNING ENDEAVOR, YOU MUST NEVER lose sight of the big picture. While your day-to-day focus may be on making a given function or a given page execute faster, the larger goal is always to make the application run faster as a whole. Occasionally, you can make one-time changes that improve the overall performance of an application.
The most important factor in good performance is careful and solid design and good programming methodologies. There are no substitutes for these. Given that, there are a number of tunings you can make outside PHP to improve the performance of an application. Server-level or language-level tunings do not make up for sloppy or inefficient coding, but they ensure that an application performs at its best.
This chapter quickly surveys several techniques and products that can improve application performance. Because these all exist either deep inside PHP's internals or as external technologies, there is very little actual PHP code in this chapter. Please don't let that dissuade you from reading through the chapter, however; sometimes the greatest benefits can be gained through the symbiotic interaction of technologies.
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