Scaling PHP Applications (2014)

Parting Advice

I hope that by the time you’ve finished this book, you’ve picked up some solid nuggets of information that you can implement today and use to improve and refine your stack. Scaling and peformance optimization is a “life-long” process that you constantly need to work on and refine— what works for you today may not necessarilly be the best solution tomorrow as your traffic changes, hardware gets faster and cheaper, and new tools come out.

What I hope that you’ve learned is that scaling can be complex, but it’s not impossible, and that it’s more about owning your stack, being intimate with all of the moving peices, more than writing “faster code”. Go forth with your new knowledge and build some massively successful websites ;)

If you purchased the Solo Founder or Startup version of the book, the next 70 or so pages are filled with great case studies of real-life problems that I ran into scaling Twitpic. These case-studies are filled with invaluable information that you can’t find anywhere on the internet— far from your your average PHP tutorial.

1. Horizontally scaling user uploads

2. How DNS took down Twitpic for 4 hours

3. Scaling MySQL Vertically (10 to 3 MySQL Servers)

4. Hot MySQL Backups w/ Percona

5. Async Posting w/ Kestrel saved my butt

6. The missing guide to Memcached

7. HTTP Caching and the Nginx Fastcgi Cache

8. CakePHP Framework Caching: A lesson in debugging

9. Optimizing image handling in PHP

10.Benchmarking and Load Testing Web Services

Want to upgrade?

If you’re regretting only grabbing the PDF, rejoice! You can upgrade and grab the case studies, simply pay the difference. It’s completely automated and you’ll be able to download and read these 10 awesome case studies immediately.

Upgrade to PDF + Case Studies

The direct link is https://gumroad.com/l/vmyM

** Scaling is an art, not a science **

Sending Feedback and Testimonials

If you enjoyed this book, I’d love to hear from you. Testimonials are welcome and will be featured with a backlink to your website. Send questions, feedbacks and testimonials directly to me at hello@scalingphpbook.com and I’ll email you back ASAP.

In too deep? Need help ASAP?

I know what it’s like to be up the creek without a paddle— website constantly crashing with huge scaling problems that you needed fixed weeks ago. If you’re too busy to implement these changes yourself, or need in-depth evaluation and code-review, I’m avaliable for remote and on-site consultation. Email me at hello@scalingphpbook.com with the subject “HELP!” and I can be digging through your code in less than an hour. I can typically diagnose core issues, provide hot-fixes, and create a long-term growth/scaling plan in about 4 hours. It’s powerful and quick.

Updates?

What about updates? I’m dreading the idea of this book ever becoming outdated. While I can’t promise to make major revisions (I might, thought, there is a bunch of stuff I wanted to add but had to cut, lest I write a 400-page snorefest), I will try to keep it reasonably up-to-date and address major breaking changes in PHP. For example, I originally wrote this book when PHP 5.4 was released, but have updated it for PHP 5.5.

About the Author

Steve Corona is the CTO of Twitpic, one of the largest sites on the internet, and the biggest photo sharing application for Twitter. Steve dropped out of college in 2008, and grew Twitpic to 60 million visitors and 20 billion HTTP requests with no formal training or knowledge.