Optimize your PHAR¶
Review your files¶
By default Box try to be smart about which files are required and will attempt to use only the necessary files. You can
list the files of your PHAR with the box info --list command. It is however possible you want a finer control in which
case you can adapt the included files thanks to the configuration options.
All the files in the PHAR are loaded in-memory when executing a PHAR. As a result, the more content there is to load, the bigger the overhead will be and unlike your regular application, a PHAR will not benefit from the opcache optimisations. The difference should however be minimal unless you have dozens of thousands of files in which case you might either accept it, consider an alternative or contribute to the PHAR extension in order to optimise it.
Compress your PHAR¶
You can also greatly enhance the size of your PHAR by compressing it:
- The compression algorithm setting. It is very efficient, however note that a compressed PHAR
requires the
zipPHP extension and has a (micro) overhead since PHP needs to uncompress the archive before using it - Compactors can also help to compress some contents for example by removing the unnecessary comments and spaces in PHP and JSON files.
Optimize your code¶
Another code performance optimisation that can be done is always use fully qualified symbols or use statements. For example the following:
<?php
namespace Acme;
use stdClass;
use const BAR;
use function foo;
new stdClass();
foo(BAR);
Will be more performant than:
<?php
namespace Acme;
use stdClass;
new stdClass();
foo(BAR);
Indeed in the second case, PHP is unable to know from where foo or BAR comes from. So it will first try to find
\Acme\foo and \Acme\BAR and if not found will fallback to \foo and BAR. This fallback lookup creates a
minor overhead. Besides some functions such as count are optimised by opcache so using a fully qualified call
\count or importing it via a use statement use function count will be even more optimised.
However you may not want to care and change your code for such micro optimisations. But if you do, know that isolating your PHAR code will transform every call into a fully qualified call whenever possible enabling that optimisation for your PHAR.