How to liven up a dull blog
Performance problems again, but this time at an application level. So I finally get around to trying out PHP profiling tools in earnest. XDebug and WinCacheGrind give very useful information where a script is spending its time, without having to go dropping bits of benchmarking code around.
I know this is old news - I’ve just not had a real need before now. So I go hunting for good info on how to get the most from WinCacheGrind, and the project’s SourceForge homepage has a really interesting approach to livening up what could otherwise be a slightly dry geeky subject.
Not an approach I would feel adopting long term, but I thought I might try it out just once…
In my limited experience of optimising web sites, 99.999% of the time worth saving is in DB queries. Optimising MySQL, both queries and server config, gave me orders of magnitude greater performance on moblog. After I’d done the db stuff, I barely even touched the PHP - it runs so fast compared to MySQL that I was going to spend more time optimising than I’d save by optimising. If that makes sense..
Comment by mat — December 6, 2007 @ 5:19 pm
> In my limited experience of optimising web sites, 99.999% of the time worth saving is in DB queries.
Totally agree and that’s probably why I’ve never got around to trying this sort of profiling before. However we hadn’t got all we wanted from db queries alone so I was trying a different tack.
It did identify another few savings that could be achieved through modifying the way we were using db queries rather than the queries themselves, but mainly it was a useful insight into where time was actually being spent.
Even if it was to confirm that most of the time is in db calls
Comment by jaydublu — December 7, 2007 @ 10:03 am