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CakePHP offers a lot of functionality to us as developers. The ability to develop websites rapidly provides a trade-off in how quickly the website will load. As we expand our skills, we will learn the techniques that will slow down/speed up performance.

Objectives

• Apply techniques to speed up CakePHP’s load time
• Optimize our queries
• Cache query results

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On some of our more recent projects, we have been using the Containable behavior that CakePHP provides.  It works quite nicely, a lot easier than the previous format of having to bind and unbind models on the fly.

The pitfalls began to appear when some of our clients were reporting that some pages are extremely slow.  After a bit of research, it was quite apparent that the root of the cause was attributed to us using the containable feature. More »

I’ll continue today with another good database programming article.  If you missed yesterdays, you may view it here.

Today’s article will discuss when to use a static COUNT() versus a dynamic COUNT().  On a regular basis we are tasked with creating a message center or a photo album and we need to display a count of new messages or pictures in the album.

The obvious solution is to do a simple query: SELECT COUNT(*) FROM pictures WHERE album_id = 1 and display the result beside our album name.  Now, let’s assume that we allow multiple albums our actual query would be closer to this: SELECT albums.*, COUNT(pictures.*) as picture_count FROM albums INNER JOIN pictures ON albums.id = pictures.album_id WHERE albums.id = 1.  This will of course work, but let me show you a better, more practical approach that will improve performance significantly on large databases. More »

Quite often we get a complaint from a client that their homepage is too slow.  The first thing we do is load the homepage up and see for ourselves.  Yep, it looks slow, so the next step is too see what is being done.  Quite often you’ll see some random data being displayed on the homepage.  Whether it’s random news articles, photos, videos, etc…If this is not the case, you may find my article on improving slow loading web pages more useful.

If the homepage is slow because of random data, you can lay a bet with high certainty that those 10 random articles are being pulled with an ORDER BY RAND() OR NEWID() slowing the site to a crawl.  In case you are curious the difference, RAND() is the MySQL way and NEWID() is the SQL Server way.  In this article, I’ll show you why you should avoid these functions and several different solutions to help you overcome this issue. More »

When you do SQL queries do you find yourself always, or almost always, using left joins?  If you’ve answered yes to this question, I would suggest to continue to read and understand some downfalls that you might be getting yourself into.

Let’s start by looking at a standard query that has a left join:

SELECT * FROM users u LEFT JOIN countries c ON c.id = u.country_id WHERE u.id = 5

The following query will return all fields from the users table and all fields from the countries table.  Now you’re thinking, “Yeah, looks good, so what’s wrong with this?”.  Well, I’m glad you asked. More »

If you’re not familiar with how some people accomplish getting their web sites submitted to Google quickly, you are going to absolutely love this article.

I’ve bet you’ve heard from many people that it can take days, weeks, even months to get indexed by Google.  If you have heard that, you’re now thinking, “OK Jamie, you must have had a really stressful day at work today and you’re now hallucinating that this is possible!”.

If I read this blog title a while ago, I’m sure I would be thinking the same thing as you!  Ok, let’s move on to how to get indexed by Google within one hour. More »