PHP Application Performance: Optimization, Caching, and Profiling

The book "PHP Application Performance" is a practical guide that will help you make your PHP code faster, more efficient, and more scalable. In today's world, where page load speed and service responsiveness directly impact conversion and user experience, knowledge of optimization techniques is becoming a mandatory skill for any PHP developer.

This book is written for PHP programmers of all levels — from beginners who want to write good code from the start, to experienced developers striving to get the most out of their projects. You don't need any special knowledge beyond basic proficiency in PHP and web technologies.

From this book you will learn:

• Profiling basics: how to find bottlenecks in code using Xdebug, Blackfire.io, and built-in PHP tools.
• Code optimization: choosing efficient algorithms, working with loops, strings, and arrays, reducing memory consumption.
• Caching: configuring OpCache, using Redis/Memcached, caching database queries, HTML fragments, and entire pages.
• Working with databases: optimizing SQL queries, using indexes, reducing the number of queries (N+1 problem).
• Networks and external requests: asynchronicity, connection pools, caching HTTP responses.
• Infrastructure: configuring PHP-FPM, web servers (Nginx/Apache), choosing hosting, and load balancing.
• Real-world cases: analyzing typical performance problems and their solutions.

Special attention is given to practical examples and ready-made solutions. Each chapter contains code that can be immediately applied in your project. The book is not overloaded with theory — the focus is on what really works in production environments.

After reading, you will be able to confidently conduct a performance audit of any PHP application, find and eliminate bottlenecks, and design architecture with high load in mind. This is not just a book to read — it is a desktop reference that you will return to again and again.

Who this book is for: PHP developers, DevOps engineers, team leads, and anyone who wants their web applications to run fast and stable.