There are numerous options of adapting the web server in such a way that performance is increased and that it works better with a higher load from the administration side as well. It is, of course, possible to use certain forms of clustering, but that is not the topic of this section. Instead, we will cover useful supplementary product lines and smart configuration of PHP.
PHP's standard distribution comes with two versions of the php.ini configuration file: php.ini-dist with the standard attributes, as well as php.ini-recommended with a few adjustments for performance (and also security, see Chapter 11). The following attributes are different from php.in-dist:
register_globals: This attribute is switched off. This is not only good for security, but also gives PHP a bit higher performance, since you don't have to apply global variables any more.register_long_arrays: This attribute is switched off and the$HTTP_*_VARSglobal arrays are not applied...