In the last chapter, we went over different techniques to secure our web server installation and our database server; we also continued our work by adding filtering functionality that will help us sanitize the incoming data. In this chapter, we will go over a few techniques to optimize the performance of our software stack. Our application has already gained a performance increase due to the introduction of caching on various levels in Chapter 7, Caching. The aim of this chapter is to help us become aware of the options that are available for optimization, but not to implement these techniques from the get-go. Optimizing an application before thorough profiling may adversely affect the application. However, as developers, it is very important that we are aware of potential best-practice optimization techniques that are used while building our application. We will begin by discussing the optimizations that we will put in for our Apache web server and then...