ZF2 Optimize for high traffic

Question

My ZF2 application seems to be extremely slow when more than 3 users are using it at the same time.

I profile my code with xdebug and webgrind and non of my function

Answer 1

All of the above and using some kind of opcode caching like APC / Opcache it will speed things up. But yes ZF 2 seems to be very slow unfortunately even more slow then ZF 1 :(

Also the module config cache speeds things up, you cannot have any closures though to make this working ;)

http://hounddog.github.io/blog/performance-in-zend-framework-2/

Answer 2

the ZF2 classmap generator will give you a big boost if you have a large project:

http://framework.zend.com/manual/2.0/en/modules/zend.loader.classmap-generator.html

Alternatively if you are using composer (you should do) then you can use composer to generate the classmap for all your modules and dependdencies too which is even better:

php composer.phar install --optimize-autoloader

php composer.phar update --optimize-autoloader

Answer 3

First of all to speedup your zf2 application you should use ZendOptimizerPlus. The vast part of execution time used to read and precompile php code. Typical ZF2 app has a lot of files, so it takes a lot of time to handle them.

ZendOp+ saves bytecode of your php application in shared memory, so server doesn't read a lot of files and doesn't parse it every request. ZendOp+ will be at php5.5 by default, so it is useful to know it and to use it.

Benchmarks gives 9x increase in performance for simple framework applications (symfony2 tests - http://www.ricardclau.com/2013/03/apc-vs-zend-optimizer-benchmarks-with-symfony2/ ).

I use it for my zf2 + doctrine2 + zfcUser application. Memcached is used for doctrine2 purposes, it gives only about 5% performance increase. So with ZendOp+ I got 6x increase (0.2 -> 0.03s) for simple pages and 3x increase (0.2 - 0.06) for complex pages with a lot of forms, entities, views. If I use classmap generator, I will update the answer.

Another issue is to use nginx + php-fpm rather than apache2+module. It saves server resources.

Answer 4

There's few very simple steps to achieve a faster application. There's three things that can always be considered.

1. ZF2 Performance QuickTipp #1 - ViewModels Always manually assign the fully qualified script to render. This will increase the performance a little. It's done like this:

   public function someAction()
   {
       $viewModel = new ViewModel();
       $viewModel->setTemplate('MODULE / CONTROLLER / ACTION.phtml');
       // In this given example: $viewModel->setTemplate('foo/bar/some.phtml');
   
       // Do some other Controller-logic as used to
   
       return $viewModel->setVariables(array(
           //key-value-paired view-variables
       ));
   }
   

2. ZF2 Performance QuickTipp #2 - Classmap Autoloading This probably is one of the most important parts of speeding up your application. Personally i've seen an increase in LoadingTimes by up to 40%. Implementing this is pretty simple:

   class Module 
   {
       public function getAutoloaderConfig()
       {
           return array(
              'Zend\Loader\ClassMapAutoloader' => array(
                   __DIR__ . '/autoload_classmap.php',
              ),
           );
       }
   }
   

   The autoload_classmap.php then is a simple array of 'FQ-CLASSNAME' => 'FQ-FILEPATH'. This can be automatted pretty easily using the classmap_generator-utility of ZF2

3. ZF2 Performance QuickTipp #3 - Keep Module.php light! Sadly this is a post i haven't come around to write yet. The Module.php is a file that is loaded on every single request. Lots of people forget about this and write lots and lots of factories inside them. At one point, ZfcUser-Module.php was an example of what not to do. Closures or anonymous functions are executed on every request, too. This is quite a bit of work to be done if there's too many of them over the whole project. A better approach would be to simply write Factory-Classes. ZfcUser later updated Module.php to use this strategy.

And that's pretty much all the easy stuff one can do (that i know of - i dont know much! :D). However what sounds interesting is that starting to use 3 users your application runs slow. To my experience this has nothing to do with the scripts itself but is rather an server issue. Is this from a Staging Machine or locally?

Answer 5

If you are using Doctrine, don't forget to add a cache for annotations. This drastically improve performance (when I activate this cache I divide nearly by two the loading time). If you are using DoctrineORMModule:

'doctrine' => array(
    'driver' => array(

        'cache' => array(
            'class' => 'Doctrine\Common\Cache\ApcCache'
        ),

        'configuration' => array(
            'orm_default' => array(
                'metadata_cache' => 'apc',
                'query_cache'    => 'apc',
                'result_cache'   => 'apc'
            )
        ),
    )
)

However, it's quite inconvenient while developing because you must clear the cache whenever your mapping change.