I must admit, it was the first PHP conference I’ve ever been and really enjoyed it. Though meeting new people is always difficult, but my colleague Kalpana and I were able to chat with less than 10 PHP fans 🙂
Listening to Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, was cool! He tried to connect his mac laptop to the university’s wireless network and he could not. He showed us 3 photos: a cruise, a mountain top, and a naked land in India (a cow was sitting :p) he asked us to guess what was common in those 3 places. We all shouted in a choir “no internet connection“! He surprised us: they provided him with a wireless connection in the conferences he’d been invited in those places, but we could not in the heart of London!!!
In his slides he had some very usefull optimisation techniques in PHP/PostgreSQL applications. On one side, a dummy web programmer would have asked the boss to buy 100 very powerfull and expensive servers to serve a few thousand visitors per second. On the other hand, an expert PHP programmer would have changed the code a bit and configure the server to achieve this, especially opening and closing database connections are very time consuming operations for PostgreSQL rather than querying the database.
For example, using a persistent connection may help a lot, depending on the web server architecture, because each request may be served by a different server process and hence cannot use the available persistent connection.
Getting rid of secure connections to the database will increase performance, because if the database server is configured to accept local connections only, it is secure already!!