Make localhost faster?

Question

I am currently working on a project and testing it on my localhost.

The thing I am worried about is that pages are loaded quite slow (500-700ms and not less). I thought localhost would load faster than any other web page (as it resides on my local machine). Therefore, if these are the load times on localhost, would they be significantly bigger when moving my site on a remote server?

As technical details, I am developing on CakePHP framework and have several AJAX requests, all taking the above specified time to load. The requests shouldn't be time-consuming, as they load a CakePHP-generated pages with MySQL operations which take less than 3ms (as shown in the framework's debugger). I am also using XAMPP (therefore Apache webserver) on a Windows 7 machine.

Thank you for your answers and I believe this post would be useful to others as well.

Answer 1

You'll probably see faster loading time - it's unlikely your computer is as powerful as a real server.

Personally, I'm always surprised by how much faster my projects run live - but this could depend on the server. You should upload a quick test to ease your worry.

Answer 2

Also bear in mind that when testing you will probably use debug set to greater than 0. When greater then 0 your model structures are not cached making cake reload them on every request

Answer 3

If you're saying MySQL is fast, but the slowdown is purely in PHP, enabling the APC extension may help. APC caches the output of the PHP parser and does a few other optimizations. Often it can save a ton.

But in general, you'll want to do profiling. Use XDebug to get profiling information and use WinCacheGrind to read out where things are slow.