Hi guys - Im in a bit of a pickle here. We're working on a portal website using teh zend framework - although we're nearly halfway through development the zend framework seem sto be really slow and it takes a while for pages to load.

I'm not sure how to speed it up although I've read about Zend_loader taking up most of teh resources. However apart from that we are looking for a web host to host our portal soon and Im not sure what to specifically look for in a web host if I need to make sure my zend framework based project runs at an accelerated rate and now real slow as how its dragging right now.

To put it short I'm not sure how to speed up the framework and cos of that I'm not sure what to check for in a host to make sure my Zend framework runs as planned. Need help real quick here

Well, having Zend Optimizer / other accelerators is useful, but most hosts don't advertise this anyway.

First priority I guess would be to make sure that you are getting what you need.
What diskspace and bandwidth will you require?

well its a portal site and currently on our localhost the db itself is around 150 MB .

Theres a lot of data involved however we wont be utilizing any uploading and downloading videos and images so that shouldn't be an issue when choosing bandwidth. My major concern is that the site doesn't run too slow online as we seem to be facing issues with it on our localhost.

We used an ACL list which took about 8 secs/ pageload.

Our solution to that was to cache it.


Try and see if there's any "heavy" stuff you can't cache to optimize performance. You can always delete the cache if you've made changes to something and recache it.

Well, can you afford dedicated zervers? Whats your budget?
If you can afford around 400$ per month I can recommend some options, including hardware caching and optimization.

I don't know if this hardware caching was in response to mine, but I meant using Zend_Cache to cache pieces of software that don't change very often and that can possibly slow the site down a lot .

No it wasnt, and he should know Zend Cache already

Now that you pointed it - I never used Zend_Cache at all! I'm a bit of a noob here -and like how do I use Zend Cache and where should I use it - please guys I need help here