debuggable

Hey folks,

as an application comes closer and closer to its launch date, not having cared about performance during development becomes more and more of a problem.
There are several ways to improve the performance of your CakePHP application. The first thing one would think about is generally caching of your views and database queries. However, during development stage implementing caching can cause a lot of confusion and phantom bugs. In short, it might waste your time which is better put into features. Any performance improvement that does not effect how data is retrieved, stored and cached is welcome. If it affects your entire site and not only parts of it, it's all the better.

With the help of Mark Story's excellent CakePHP DebugKit I got the idea of disabling Cake's reverse route lookup to gain performance. Almost half a second per request for link-heavy sites.

The Hack

As you use the HtmlHelper to create links with the helper's link() method, you throw an url in the form of an array at Router::url() everytime. With the complex routes parsing done for every $html->link() call, this becomes a big issue for link-heavy sites. There will be the most overhead if you have a lot of routes installed. So I thought if it's easily possible to override the behaviour for standard urls that don't need routes parsing. A classical example would be:

Since this link is dynamic (depending on the article id) it does not need routes parsing (most of the time, more on that later). There are others, like 4 parameters, 2 parameters, pagination links that have named params in the url .. or only one parameter if only the 'controller' is present and you want to access the index action, etc. I have tinkered a little and wrote some code that we are using in most of our projects now and it has worked out quite well. In fact it is saving almost half a second for every request:

How does it work?

As you can see, it's simply overriding the default behaviour for Helper::url() in your AppHelper. It goes through the classical cases and builds out the url via lightweight string concatenation. Not a beauty, but fast.

What it really does is breaking the reverse routing feature. That means if you specify such a route:

Router::connect('/login', array('controller' => 'auth', 'action' => 'login'));

Then create a link with $html->link('Login Now!', array('controller' => 'auth', 'action' => 'login')), the link url will not automagially transform into '/login' anymore. This is pretty bad, however if your site hardcodes the urls used in routes, this is not a problem. This means that instead of providing array('controller' => 'auth', 'action' => 'login'), you just do '/login', which I always do for specific pages since there aren't so many of them. So the hack helps for non-dynamic cases.

Usage

To use the code, acknowledge it's more like a site-specific optimization. By the way, for those of you who think I should just go ahead and contribute a patch to CakePHP that will make it possible to disable reverse route lookup, I talked to Nate already. He said he is in the process of rewriting the Routing for Cake 1.3 and it will be much faster. In the meantime, this might help you.

Copy and paste the url() function to your AppHelper class in app_helper.php. Try it out and see if it works for you. Obviously, it doesn't affect all cases and is pretty specific to how we write urls. However, it falls back to the normal url parsing if no appropriate case is found. Any suggestions, bug reports and contributions are welcome.

Disclaimer:

In no way do I claim that this code will work as well for you as it does for us. It's specific to how urls are written using $html->link() and you might screw over your app by using this. Take extra caution when using it - especially with reverse route lookup - and make sure to test your app thoroughly.

-- Tim Koschuetzki aka DarkAngelBGE