Faster code?

rIkLuNd

Is there any way of coding in a special way so that the code is executed as fast as possible. I want my pages to load as fast as possible... Is there any way of doing this?

sarahk

Ummm, there are lots of ways to code slow...

depends on how you are coding now.

Saw a thing yesterday which showed how

echo "Hello World";

was slower than

?>Hello World<?

It may not be your php code that's causing the delay, it may be your html.

There's the whole argument about how

is better than

because the single quotes around the zero add to the file size and therefore the page takes longer to load.

Or it could be bloated graphics or uncached javascript and stylesheets which should be loaded into .js and .css files for optimisation.

So... what are the specific areas of concern?

rIkLuNd

Well, I was thinking of coding a page with php (of course...) and mysql and I want it to go as fast as possible so that the users feel like this site is good. I now from my own experience that it's not fun to visit websites that takes a long time to load...

jabba_29

If you have images, make sure you include their size too:

height="XX" width="xx"..

Aslos depends on what standard you are wanting to write your code, all elements i.e. height, width, a href etc. should be "quoted" to be xhtml or html (4?) valid.

Jamie

Weedpacket

Originally posted by jabba_29
Aslos depends on what standard you are wanting to write your code, all elements i.e. height, width, a href etc. should be "quoted" to be xhtml or html (4?) valid.

And such code should render faster because it's easier to parse. Two bytes won't make much of a difference since it's unlikely to result in fewer IP packets being transferred (just eliminating gratuitous whitespace padding from the HTML would save a lot more). And some more improvement can be achieved by generating valid (X)HTML and attaching an appropriate DOCTYPE imprimatur, 'cos then the browser has a chance to know what to expect (attaching the wrong imprimatur can of course make things worse, like breaking any promise can). More ideas (some of which I disagree with) can be found by Googling on "Extreme HTML Optimization".

One significant speedup that a lot of sites I've seen could do with is more intelligent use of SQL. If your DBMS is up to it, suitable views, triggers, and/or stored procedures can take remarkable amounts of workload off the web server and move it to the database server: then the traffic between the database and the script can consist only of information that is actually needed. Even without those facilities, just thinking about the SQL can do good (e.g., be very wary about "SELECT * ...").

Then you can consider one of the PHP optimisers/precompilers out there (Zend's product line, APC, etc.).

And a faster machine never hurts, either 🙂

spirp

Another good thind to do might be to time certain parts of your code, and try to optimize it. Ie you not sure which of two methods is faster.

Create a function like this (snipped from the documentation, http://www.php.net/manual/sv/function.microtime.php):

function getMicrotime () { 
    list($usec, $sec) = explode(" ",microtime()); 
    return ((float)$usec + (float)$sec); 
}

Now do something like this:

$time_start = getMicrotime();
$dbh->query($query);
$time_end = getMicrotime();
$time_elapsed = $time_end - $time_start;

Now the elapsed time is stored and ready for output or logging.

Good luck,
Olle