Optimizing your (ZF) web application

Over at IDG, we’re currently working on moving all our applications from a php4 codebase to php5 (as everyone should). In the process we’re also porting all of our applications to Zend Framework (talking about migrations ;)). After finishing our first project, and moving it over the performance testing phase and all, we encountered quite a few issues. There are some typical things you can avoid, so bare with me.

A few days ago, I found this very interesting blogpost by Till, which shows a lot of common pitfalls for optimizing your ZF application. While we don’t have the visitor numbers he has for this particular project, we also have a lot less hardware to work with. Let me emphasize that. We have a lot less hardware to work with.

For this particular application, we have two, dualcore, 2ghz machines available, with 2GB of memory, and some default scsi hd hardware (nothing fancy). Above on that, the 2GB memory is shared with an apache 1.3 instance, using up about 1.4GB of memory. So we end up with about 600MB for our second apache2 and php5 instance. Not much I can tell you