You have just looked at improving the efficiency of your PHP applications by using features of the PHP language to your advantage. Of these, you can probably get the most significant improvement through careful selection of the most appropriate built-in function for the task at hand. In fact, this idea alone constitutes nearly half of this section. You can use the other techniques discussed to further tune your applications for best performance.

In Optimizing database queries, let's look at improving the performance of your SQL code when used within your PHP applications.