Speaking at OsCon

This year OsCon will be graced by my presence.  And by that I mean; I get to go to OsCon!!

This month on July 27th I will be speaking on PHP Performance.   I’m convinced that application performance is one of the most misunderstood problems out there.  How do I know this?  I spent just under 4 years as a consultant with Zend and I spent a great deal of my time doing performance audits of PHP applications.  There does seem to be a fair amount of, I guess I would call it blindness, among PHP developers concerning performance.  This isn’t something that’s limited to PHP developers, either.  I’ve worked in several environments as an administrator and a lot of developers in general, regardless of the language, seem to build their applications according to some predefined methodology (or lack thereof) without concern for performance.  If performance is not a concern then this isn’t an issue.  And often performance isn’t a concern… until it is.

Then you have people on the other side of the fence who will refuse to use objects because arrays are faster.  They are the people who do a foreach loop 100,000 times over two functions to find out which one performs 7.9% better.  News flash!  Unless your application is calling something 100,000 times it doesn’t matter which you choose.  And if you are calling a function 100,000 times for a single HTTP request then there is something wrong with your application’s architecture.

At the talk I will talk about some of the main areas where people experience performance problems, some of the symptoms of various performance problems and some tricks you can use to lead you towards the correct diagnosis of performance problems.

I’m looking forward to speaking and I’m hoping you can join me at this year’s OsCon.