Varnish Cache is an HTTP accelerator and reverse proxy developed by Danish consultant and FreeBSD core developer Poul-Henning Kamp, along with other developers at Norwegian Linpro AS. It was released in 2006. According to Pingdom.com, a company focused on web performance, in 2012 Varnish was already famous among the wo...
This article is part of a series on building a sample application — a multi-image gallery blog — for performance benchmarking and optimizations. (View the repo here.)Let’s continue optimizing our app. We’re starting with on-the-fly thumbnail generation that takes 28 seconds per request, depend...
Some years ago, the Apache Foundation’s web server, known simply as “Apache”, was so ubiquitous that it became synonymous with the term “web server”. Its daemon process on Linux systems has the name httpd (meaning simply http process) — and comes preinstalled in major Linux distribut...
You may remember our past infatuation with Phalcon, the fastest PHP framework. In this post, we’ll go through the process of getting it up and running in 5 minutes on one of our Homestead Improved instances. If you’re not interested in why or what Phalcon is, just skip ahead to “Setting it up”. ...
When Heroku announced their (quite reasonable) new limits for free apps, I realized that I would have to find another source of hosting for all the small, low-traffic projects that I currently have running on Heroku. Way back in the day, Heroku was totally free for apps that only required one dyno, but after years of a...
I was doing some local dev work recently, but for the first time in my “new” browser – Opera. I set up my [Homestead Improved](http://www.sitepoint.com/quick-tip-get-homestead-vagrant-vm-running/) instance and its virtual hosts as usual, but then couldn’t get anything other than a 502 error to s...
Editor’s Note: Today marks a special day for WordPress. Powering many websites (and yes, Smashing Magazine is one of them), it celebrates its 13th birthday today. Happy birthday, dear WordPress! Here’s to many more! Do you remember when you could run a “fast” WordPress website with ju...
One of the most popular requests in our end-year reader-satisfaction survey was more PHP 7 content. In this quick guide, we’ll cover two ways to bring a PHP 7 server online on DigitalOcean – a popular VPS provider. We’ll use two approaches, the latter of which will be applicable to any Ubuntu installation whe...
Munee is an asset management tool which can compile LESS, SCSS, or CoffeeScript, manipulate images, minify CSS and JS, and cache assets on the server and client on the fly. It works with PHP 5.3 and newer versions.In this tutorial, we will learn how Munee makes it easy to include assets in templates, how to install i...
In this article, we will be looking at some of the common caching techniques in PHP: Opcache, Expires Headers and Query Caching in MySQL. We’ll look at additional approaches in part 2.PHP’s Request Lifecycle Before we move on, it’s important to understand PHP’s request lifecycle. What happens behind the scene...
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