Internationalizing and localizing a site are fantastic ways to expand your audience and ensure that all visitors can get to the information they need. However, it often comes with a performance penalty. Below are some strategies you can employ to reduce the overhead of i18n and l10n.
Not all translation adapters are made equal. Some have more features than others, and some perform better than others. Additionally, you may have business requirements that force you to use a particular adapter. However, if you have a choice, which adapters are fastest?
Zend Framework ships with a variety of translation adapters. Fully half of them utilize an XML format, incurring memory and performance overhead. Fortunately, there are several adapters that utilize other formats that can be parsed much more quickly. In order of speed, from fastest to slowest, they are:
If high performance is one of your concerns, we suggest utilizing one of the above adapters.
Maybe, for business reasons, you’re limited to an XML-based translation adapter. Or perhaps you’d like to speed things up even more. Or perhaps you want to make l10n operations faster. How can you do this?
Both Zend_Translator and Zend_Locale implement caching functionality that can greatly affect performance. In the case of each, the major bottleneck is typically reading the files, not the actual lookups; using a cache eliminates the need to read the translation and/or localization files.
You can read about caching of translation and localization strings in the following locations:
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