Learning PHP 7 High Performance

Altaf Hussain

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785882265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming in PHP
• Index: Computer Science

Improve the performance of your PHP application to ensure the application users aren't left waiting

About This Book

• Make the optimum use of PHP coding to improve your programming productivity
• Leverage the potential of PHP for server-side programming, memory management, and object-oriented programming
• Packed with real-life examples to help the readers implement concepts as they learn

Who This Book Is For

This book is for those who have basic experience in PHP programming. If you are developing performance-critical applications, then this book is for you.

What You Will Learn

• Setup high performance development and production environment for PHP 7
• Discover new OOP features in PHP 7 to achieve high performance
• Improve your PHP applications' performance
• Attain improved database performance
• Benchmark PHP applications to optimize them
• Write quality code by learning to improve code reusability, simplicity, and expressiveness
• Get rid of the bottlenecks in your PHP 7 applications by writing PHP code optimally
• Tackle issues related to web applications, such as high user dependency and large datasets

In Detail

PHP is a great language for building web applications. It is essentially a server-side scripting language that is also used for general-purpose programming. PHP 7 is the latest version, providing major backward-compatibility breaks and focusing on high performance and speed.

This fast-paced introduction to PHP 7 will improve your productivity and coding skills. The concepts covered will allow you, as a PHP programmer, to improve the performance standards of your applications. We will introduce you to the new features in PHP 7 and then will run through the concepts of object-oriented programming (OOP) in PHP 7. Next, we will shed some light on how to improve your PHP 7 applications' performance and database performance. Through this book, you will be able to improve the performance of your programs using the various benchmarking tools discussed.

At the end, the book discusses some best practices in PHP programming to help you improve the quality of your code.

Style and approach

The book is a step-by-step guide to improve the quality of your code in PHP through real-time examples. The book takes a practical approach to improving the quality of your code.

Learning PHP 7 High Performance

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Table of Contents

Learning PHP 7 High Performance

Credits

About the Author

Acknowledgement

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

eBooks, discount offers, and more

Why subscribe?

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Downloading the color images of this book

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Setting Up the Environment

Setting up Windows

Setting up Debian or Ubuntu

Debian

Ubuntu

Setting up CentOS

Installing NGINX

Installing PHP 7

Installing Percona Server

Setting up Vagrant

Summary

2. New Features in PHP 7

OOP features

Type hints

Scalar type hints

Return type hints

Namespaces and group use declaration

Non mixed group use declarations

Mixed group use declarations

The compound namespace declaration

The anonymous classes

Old-style constructor deprecation

The throwable interface

Error

New operators

The Spaceship operator (<=>)

The null coalesce operator(??)

Uniform variable syntax

Miscellaneous features and changes

Constant arrays

Multiple default cases in the switch statement

The options array for session_start function

Filtered unserialize function

Summary

3. Improving PHP 7 Application Performance

NGINX and Apache

Apache

NGINX

HTTP server optimization

Caching static files

Apache

NGINX

HTTP persistent connection

Apache

NGINX

GZIP compression

Apache

NGINX

Using PHP as a separate service

Disabling unused modules

Apache

NGINX

Web server resources

NGINX

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Using CDN

CSS and JavaScript optimization

Merging

Minifying

Minify

Grunt

Full page caching

Varnish

The infrastructure

Web servers

The database server

Load balancer (LB)

HAProxy load balancing

HAProxy installation

HAProxy load balancing

Summary

4. Improving Database Performance

The MySQL database

Query caching

Storage engines

The MyISAM storage engine

The InnoDB storage engine

innodb_buffer_pool_size

innodb_buffer_pool_instances

innodb_log_file_size

The Percona Server - a fork of MySQL

Installing the Percona Server

MySQL performance monitoring tools

phpMyAdmin

The MySQL workbench

Percona Toolkit

pt-query-digest

pt-duplicate-key-checker

Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC)

Redis – the key-value cache store

Connecting with the Redis server

Storing and fetching data from the Redis server

Redis management tools

Memcached key-value cache store

Summary

5. Debugging and Profiling

Xdebug

Debugging with Sublime Text

Debugging with Eclipse

Profiling with Xdebug

PHP DebugBar

Summary

6. Stress/Load Testing PHP Applications

Apache JMeter

ApacheBench (ab)

Siege

Load testing real-world applications

Magento 2

WordPress 4

Drupal 8

Summary

7. Best Practices in PHP Programming

Coding styles

Test-driven development (TDD)

Design patterns

Service-oriented architecture (SOA)

Being object-oriented and reusable always

PHP frameworks

Version control system (VCS) and Git

Deployment and Continuous Integration (CI)

Summary

A. Tools to Make Life Easy

Composer – A dependency manager for PHP

Composer installation

Using Composer

Git – A version control system

Git installation

Using Git

Creating new branches and merging

Cloning a repository

Webhooks

Desktop tools to manage repositories

Grunt watch

Summary

B. MVC and Frameworks

The MVC design pattern

Model

Views

Controllers

Laravel

Installation

Features

Routing

Eloquent ORM

Artisan CLI

Migrations

Blade templates

Other features

Lumen

Apigility

Summary

Index

Learning PHP 7 High Performance

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: April 2016

Production reference: 1190416

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78588-226-5

www.packtpub.com

Credits

Author

Altaf Hussain

Reviewer

Raul Mesa Ros

Commissioning Editor

Kunal Parikh

Acquisition Editor

Vinay Argekar

Content Development Editor

Priyanka Mehta

Technical Editor

Ravikiran Pise

Copy Editor

Shruti Iyer

Project Coordinator

Izzat Contractor

Proofreader

Safis Editing

Indexer

Rekha Nair

Graphics

Abhinash Sahu

Production Coordinator

Manu Joseph

Cover Work

Manu Joseph

About the Author

Altaf Hussain is a fullstack web and mobile app developer with over 6 years of experience in PHP development. He received his degree in electrical engineering and specialized in computer and communications from Pakistan. Altaf is an electrical engineer on paper and a software engineer by heart.

He worked as a system programmer in his team, developing control software for small test robots using assembly languages and C. After this, Altaf got interested in web technologies and never looked back. He has worked with numerous PHP frameworks, including Zend, Laravel, and Yii, and open source systems such as Drupal, WordPress, PrestaShop, and Magento. Altaf designed and built two proprietary CMS systems with full support for multiple languages and models, permissions, and transla...

Table of contents

• Learning PHP 7 High Performance