Well, I have my alpha testing version of my Zend application done. Other than more changes coming, I need to optimize it because it’s ridiculously slow right now.

1. Metadata cache. Describe table costs 5-6 ms even on a small indexed table. Add the following to the Bootstrap file. Now the metadata cache is enabled and describe table command is gone.

                  $frontend= array(
					'lifetime' => 7200, //2 hours
					'automatic_serialization' => true
					);
		$backend= array(
						'cache_dir' => './tmp/',
						);
		$cache = Zend_Cache::factory('core',
					'File',
					$frontend,
					$backend
					);

		Zend_Registry::set('cache',$cache);
		Zend_Db_Table_Abstract:: setDefaultMetadataCache($cache) ;

I don’t have many static pages. So I’m only caching the products listing page. Add the following to the getProductByCategory function

$cache = Zend_Registry::get('cache');
			if(!$result = $cache->load('products_in_'.$category))
			{
				debug( 'caching the data...');
				$select = $this->select();
				$select 	 ->where("category=?", $category);

				if (true === is_array($order))
				{
		            $select->order($order);
		        }
		       		$rows = $this->fetchAll($select);
					if (!$rows) {
						debug("Could not find rows with category  $category");
						return FALSE;
					}
				$cache->save($rows->toArray(), 'products_in_'.$category);
				return $rows->toArray();
			}
			else
			{
				return $result;
			}

this article is interesting, I’ll keep it in mind.http://zfsite.andreinikolov.com/2008/08/zend_db_table-time-overhead-about-25-percents/

2. Server CPU intensive even on the login page —
— install eAccelerator — now the site is at least twice as fast. Still like it to be faster.

3. Client side. My app is slow enough that I used it as bench test on different browsers. Speed: IE9  >  Chrome (slightly)>Opera >> Firefox.