Search Scripts - Web Development Scripts Directory

From the introduction of the book: "This book examines some of the technologies and techniques needed to make robust and scalable applications perform in today’s high-demand world".

This book is for developers who have worked on several projects and have some good experience developing with PHP and MySQL, as well developers who develop high-demand applications or applications that handle lots of data and processing. OOP experience is recommended.

In this book you can learn about advanced MySQL concepts, like stored procedures, different drivers and storage engines, views, triggers, replications. You can also learn about PHP opcode cache with APC or eAccelerator, PHP caching techniques, Memcached, multi-tasking in PHP and MySQL with Gearman, and more. I really enjoyed reading in this book about Gearman, Memcached, APC and eAccelerator.

• Gearman is a tool that you install in you server and assign jobs from your client PHP script to a job server. It can be used for creating thumbnails of the photos your users upload, for example. The thumbnail process is usually done by a different server that has Gearman installed and maybe even better for this kind of job. This allows you to reduce the load on your client PHP script in order to make your application.
• Memcached is an high-performance distributed memory objects caching system. It provides key-value pair cache storage for your applications. It can be used to reduce the load of your database server. Basically, in uses the free memory in your server to cache objects of your application. It is really simple to work with Memcached. It provides lots of performance benefits.
• APC and eAccelerator are PHP script caching extensions. Each time you run php script the PHP engine compiles your code every time before executing it. In production environment the code is not changed all the time. APC and eAccelerator are extensions that allows you to cache the compiled PHP scripts. This way the server is not compiling the same code again and you get better performance. In PHP 6 will have APC extension built-in.

The techniques discussed in this book are used by large sites that we all know like Digg, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube and more. If its good for them, I believe it is good for you too.