Speeding up PHP script execution

Hello All,

I currently run a site www.pureescape.net , and it's all done in php. I'd like to find out about optimizing the scripts to execute faster, here's some background:

SERVER is Red Hat 9
500MHZ
768MB Ram
Latest version of PHP and Mysql.
512Kbps upload speed

Recently I created a script that creates a ramdisk and mounts it in the webroot, then copies all the php scripts to the directory. So all the files being served are served from memory, reducing disk access time. The site images have been placed on a free webhost, so, I don't even have to serve the images, only pure html, but for what it's worth, I think it should be faster. Now it's not ridiculously slow or anything, but there are times when it takes 1-2 seconds to load the page. That's not bad, but I'm interested in squeezing the most performance outta my hardware and configurations.

I'm interested in finding out about loading the mysql database in ram, and then every 5 minutes or so doing a backup to physical disk, to avoid data loss should something happen.
I'd like to hear anything about mysql optimization and also getting php scripts to execute faster. I don't want to pay for the Zend Optimizer, is there an open-source solution to this.


--PuRe

This might help:

http://phplens.com/lens/php-book/opt...ugging-php.php

Has some Open Source Links. I remember reading about some of them in one of the UK Linux mags and they were pretty decent even against Zend, although they didn't have all the features of Zend.

:D

Hope it helps.

Thanks for the link. By chance, do you know the specs for the antionline server? The site runs smoothly and there never seems to be any lag. Does it have the database on another server seperate from the scripts? How do they have it optimized? Thanks for any response.


--PuRe