#! code

I have been doing a lot of benchmarking lately with regards to what is the most efficient way to program PHP. PHP Benchmark is a site that is dedicated to that single task.

There are lots of different ways to download a web page using PHP, but which is the fastest? In this post I will go through as many different methods of downloading a web page and test them to see which is the quickest.

Here is a list of the different methods.

Working out the average of a bunch of values is quite a common task, but rather than looping through the array, adding together values as you go and the using the count() function to find out the average at the end.

The Apache Bench tool can be found in the bin directory of any standard instillation of the Apache HTTP server. It can be used to test the response times of any web server you want and can be useful if you want to stress test a mission critical server before it goes live.

To use the tool open a command prompt (or terminal), navigate the Apache bin folder and find the program ab, this is the Apache Bench tool. The simplest form of running the tool is to use a single URL. However, you must enter a full file name or the tool will give you an invalid URL error.