So I posted something on Twitter today, which wasn’t exactly news to me. I was more or less pointing out the obvious.

From a couple follow-up tweets, I guess, I need to explain more.

The idea

My thesis is that there’s a gain in page rendering time when I disable automatic view rendering and use explicit render calls ($this->render('foo');) inside my controllers. And to cut to the chase, there is. On our app, I measured a 12% improvement using Xdebug’s profiler — simple before-after-style.

General setup

I’ve blogged about Zend Framework performance before (1, 2, 3). Our setup is not the average Zend Framework quickstart application. We utilize a custom (much faster) loader (my public open source work in progress), no Zend_Application and explicit (vs. implicit) view rendering. The framework code is at 1.10.2. On the server-side, the application servers are nginx+php(-cgi).

I don’t feel like repeating myself and while a lot of issues were already addressed in new releases of the framework, or are going to be addressed in 2.0, the above links still hold a lot of truth or at least inside and pointers if you’re interested in general PHP performance (in German).

Code

IMHO, it doesn’t really matter how the rest of your application looks like. Of course all applications are different and that’s why I didn’t say, “OMG my page rendered in 100 ms”, but instead I said something like, “we got a 10+% boost”. The bottom line is that everyone wants to serve fast pages and get the most out of their hardware but since applications tend to carry different features there really is no holy grail or number to adhere to.

Proposal

I urge everyone to double-check my claim. After all, it’s pretty simple:

  1. Setup Xdebug
  2. Profile the page
  3. Restart PHP app server/processes (in case you use APC and/or php-cgi)
  4. Disable automatic view rendering: $this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender(true);
  5. Add render() call: $this->render('foo');
  6. Profile again

… simple as that.

Conclusion

All in all this thing doesn’t require too much to follow.

Automatics — such as an automatic view renderer — add convenience which results in rapid development and hopefully shorter time to market. But they do so almost always (give it nine Erlang nines ;-)) at the expense of performance.

Update, 2010-03-20 21:37: As Rob pointed out, there’s even more to gain by bypassing the helper entirely. Use the code snippet below, or consider something like the following:

Padraic also blogged extensively on Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ViewRenderer, I recommend reading Having a bad ViewRenderer day in your ZF app?.