PHP performance

Question

What can I do to increase the performance/speed of my PHP scripts without installing software on my servers?

Answer 1

1) Use latest version of PHP

The core team is working hard on improving the performance of PHP in every version.

2) Use a bytecode cache

Since PHP 5.5 a bytecode cache has been added to PHP named OPcache. Using OPcache can make a huge difference especially since PHP 7. It receives improvements in every PHP version and might even get a JIT implementation in the future.

3) Profiling

While developing profiling gives you great insight what exactly is happening. This helps a lot finding bottlenecks in your code.

One of the most used tools is XHProf but is not officially supported anymore and has issues with PHP >= 7. An alternative when you want to profile PHP >= 7 is Tideways which is a fork of XHProf.