What’s more troubling however, is the whole approach to performance optimisation as a matter of “knowing the secret handshake”. Optimisation is far more complex than that, and spending time on these “optimisation tricks” are rarely worthwhile and might often lead to unmaintainable code, if applied too early.

Google have published PHP performance guidelines, in addition to their HTML/CSS/JavaScript page speed guidelines. Similarly though, they are full of errors, contradictions and unsubstantiated claims, resulting in the PHP development team itself responding to them.

PHP optimisation is certainly not my forte, but this quote from Troels Knack-Neilsen at SitePoint gets to the core of universal performance optimisation advice. Documentation of this enhancements is always, tragically, written in an all-or-nothing, absolute sense. It disregards more pragmatic, less easily measurable qualities in application development like code legibility, future maintenance, even security.

So many performance optimisations are technically, measurably ‘correct’ by miniscule margins, and are provide simply irrelevant gains in the real world, at much greater cost to other aspects of your code.

SitePoint A Note on Google’s So-called Best Practices, via Christian Heilmann Via: sitepoint.com.