Doctrine_manual-1-2-en

Chapter 28: Improving Performance 362
Chapter 28
Improving Performance
Introduction
Performance is a very important aspect of all medium to large sized applications. Doctrine is
a large abstraction library that provides a database abstraction layer as well as objectrelational
mapping. While this provides a lot of benefits like portability and ease of
development it's inevitable that this leads to drawbacks in terms of performance. This chapter
tries to help you to get the best performance out of Doctrine.
Compile
Doctrine is quite big framework and usually dozens of files are being included on each
request. This brings a lot of overhead. In fact these file operations are as time consuming as
sending multiple queries to database server. The clean separation of class per file works well
in developing environment, however when project goes commercial distribution the speed
overcomes the clean separation of class per file -convention.
Doctrine offers method called compile() to solve this issue. The compile method makes a
single file of most used Doctrine components which can then be included on top of your
script. By default the file is created into Doctrine root by the name
Doctrine.compiled.php.
Compiling is a method for making a single file of most used doctrine runtime components
including the compiled file instead of multiple files (in worst cases dozens of files) can
improve performance by an order of magnitude. In cases where this might fail, a
Doctrine_Exception is throw detailing the error.
Lets create a compile script named compile.php to handle the compiling of Doctrine:
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// compile.php
require_once('/path/to/doctrine/lib/Doctrine.php');
spl_autoload_register(array('Doctrine', 'autoload'));
Doctrine_Core::compile('Doctrine.compiled.php');
Now we can execute compile.php and a file named Doctrine.compiled.php will be
generated in the root of your doctrine_test folder:
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$ php compile.php
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