This talk is aimed at people wanting to know how to speed up serving PHP pages by using a simple code caching mechanism and willing to have a very light explanation of some of the PHP internals.

Starting from a simple case study of the application that leads us to write bwcache, some of the solutions we tried at first are be explained by going through a very simple analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of PHP from the performance point of view.

Then we look at the way PHP stores compiled code and the way PHP can be extended using dynamically loadable modules. The structure, implementation details and the problems encountered while writing bwcache are explained.

Some benchmarks comparing no cache at all, bwcache, apc-cache, zend-cache is shown and some considerations are taken regarding the final result. Then, some of the possible future development are analyzed and discussed with the public.