[Solar-talk] Performance ideas

[Richard Thomas]

As a longtime savant fan figured it was about time I show up here...

So ok, been playing around benchmarking ZF, Solar and some ZF based
code I threw together looking at performance issues and I think
performance can  be broken down into 3 main areas of improvement

1. File loading, this is the great thing about ZF.. Zend sees these
issues and are working with the php developers to resolve some of
these.. There are some stat patches on the way that will help
loading.. That being said ZF now loads 10 files just to load the
controller code before any controller or action has been called..
ugg..

2. Debugging code... Half the job of a framework is to make it easy to
program in, this means there tends to be a lot of "extra" debugging
code to produce useful error messages and such.. Great but nice if it
could be disabled in production

3. General overhead

Anyway on to my performance ideas..

1. Ability to turn off debugging code/debugging levels

2. Path hints.. Ability to tell the system any class that starts with
X is in directory Y so absolute paths can always be used. This would
allow a single absolute path to /home/you.com/library but also allow
you to load /usr/local/php/pear/Mail.php without problem using
absolute paths.. Granted a well thought out structure can reduce this
issue greatly but when dealing with third party libraries it can be
very useful

3. Simple routing (At this point I have only used Solar in
benchmarking so this might be off base). ZF's controller is extremely
powerful but provides no easy way to bypass all the fluff and get
simplistic routing out of it without a ton of overhead. A well thought
out project doesn't need very complicated routing
http://www.test.com/aboutus for example doesn't need its own
controller its a simple about us page why not load from the index
controller IE Simple Routing for simple pages.

Again, I am just now really starting to play with solar, most of these
observations are directly related to my use of ZF