Use strace to speed up PHP

MySQL DBA has a great article on how to reduce load and response time in a PHP application… they do it by cutting down on a lot of the autoloading that happens when PHP wakes up and starts to process a page.

Another way to accomplish a similar thing is to keep a bytecode compiler like xcache running on your server; theoretically it keeps those startup functions already compiled and ready to go. Cutting down on the number of Apache modules and PHP extensions that you don’t need will also help. (That’s one of the reasons that I prefer to run individual VMs when serving up a high-load PHP application… easier to customize the environment for just that app.)