Performance of PHP Applications

The book "Performance of PHP Applications" is a practical guide for developers who want to make their projects faster, more stable, and more scalable. The author, experienced PHP developer Alexey Sokolov, shares proven techniques and tools that will help you identify bottlenecks in your code and eliminate them without losing quality.

The book is suitable both for beginners already familiar with the basics of PHP and for experienced programmers seeking to deepen their knowledge in the field of optimization. You will learn not only to write fast code, but also to properly configure the environment — from the web server to the database.

What you will learn from the book:

• Profiling and Benchmarking: how to use Xdebug, Blackfire.io, and PHPBench to find bottlenecks.
• Code Optimization: working with loops, functions, strings, and arrays — practical before-and-after examples.
• Caching: strategies for using OPcache, Redis, Memcached, as well as caching templates and database queries.
• Working with Databases: optimizing SQL queries, using indexes, connection pooling, and replication.
• Server Configuration: configuring PHP-FPM, Nginx, Apache, HTTP/2, and data compression.
• Asynchrony and Queues: RabbitMQ, Gearman, ReactPHP — when and how to use them.
• Monitoring: collecting metrics, logging, alerting with Prometheus and Grafana.

Each chapter contains real cases from production projects, ready-made code snippets, and checklists for performance auditing. You will learn not only to fix problems but also to prevent them at the design stage.

Special attention is paid to typical mistakes — from inefficient ORM queries to incorrect session usage. The book will help you reduce server response time, decrease database load, and prepare your application for traffic growth.

This is a desktop guide for those who want their PHP projects to work fast under any load — from a small website to a high-load web service.