Performant PHP

Date: April 10, 2015
Time: 9:00 AM – 3:00 PM CDT

Clean code is important, tested code is crucial, but fast code is the holy grail. In many cases, once we get our beautiful code written, we sacrifice it on the alter of speed. Fast code trumps all. But do you have to make the sacrifice? There are ways to speed up your code that don’t involve spray painting your Mona Lisa. Day Camp 4 Developers: Performant PHP will show you those ways.

We’ve gathered 5 experienced developers to show you how. These talks won’t be on the theory of caching, or a debate on disk vs. RAM. All five talks will give you actionable intel that you can begin implementing in your projects immediately.

Join us on-line for a one day virtual conference. Let our 5 experienced developers teach you to create Performant PHP. Be a part of Day Camp 4 Developers: Performant PHP.

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Ilia Alshanetsky

Profiling with XHProf

Ilia Alshanetsky, @iliaa

Measuring and improving the performance of your PHP application is critical to giving your users a great experience. To get the deep understanding where the performance flaws lay you need a profiler. XHProf is an open source, minimal overhead profiling tool for PHP that can be easily deployed on any machine and readily provide the answers to your performance questions. This session will overview the ins an outs of how to configure XHProf using several storage backends as well as how to analyze it’s results via the XHProf UI.

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Morgan Tocker

Optimizing MySQL Queries with EXPLAIN

Morgan Tocker, @morgo

The best way to get better performance, is to learn how to optimize queries. This session will tour the EXPLAIN command in MySQL and show you how to optimize queries using IMDB as an example database.

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Samantha Quinones

Supercharging Content Delivery with Varnish

Samantha Quinones, @ieatkillerbees

You have amazing content and you want to get it to your users as fast as possible. In today’s industry, milliseconds matter and slow websites will never keep up. You can use a CDN but they are expensive, make you dependent on a third party to deliver your content, and can be notoriously inflexible. Enter Varnish, a powerful, open-source caching reverse proxy that lives in your network and lets you take control of how your content is managed and delivered. We’ll discuss how to install and configure Varnish in front of a typical web application, how to handle sessions and security, and how you can customize Varnish to your unique needs. This session will teach you how Varnish can help you give your users a better experience while saving your company and clients money at the same time.

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Chris Hartjes

Hack-ing Your Legacy PHP Code

Chris Hartjes, @grmpyprogrammer

There’s this really huge web site that you might have heard of called Facebook. They needed a version of PHP that had some bug fixes and was a lot faster. So they created their own and the result is HHVM. Not to be outdone, they said “hey, there are some cool features we’d like to add to the language syntax itself but make them optional” and they created Hack.

In this session Chris will show you how you can use what Hack and HHVM can offer you to take a crufty old codebase and apply some performance and consistency to it.

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Matthew Weier-O'Phinney

PSR-7 in the Middle

Matthew Weier O’Phinney, @mwop

PHP, while built for the web, provides little in the way of HTTP message abstraction; in fact, it often gets in the way of accessing even trivial aspects of requests such as headers! For this reason, many developers turn to frameworks, as a primary facility of most is to provide HTTP message abstractions. Doing so introduces a problem: most frameworks impose non-trivial performance overhead.

PSR-7 is an initiative of the Framework Interop Group, and provides interface abstractions for HTTP messages. The goal is to allow better re-use of web-facing code — but one expected outcome is that Middleware solutions will naturally evolve.

What is middleware? Code that sits between a request and a response.

In this talk, we’ll look at PSR-7, some common middleware patterns, and how middleware may allow you to create application architectures that can reduce bootstrapping overhead in order to deliver more performant websites.

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