Zend AMF Optimisation; Tips and Tricks?

I am working on a project that uses PHP to create an 'complex' object with lots of references to other objects linking back to their parent objects etc...

The object structure is then serialized by the Zend AMF module and sent over to the flex application.

The problem is that serialization takes a lot of time (+10sec).

My question is thus: can anybody give me tips开发者_如何学编程 on how the serialization works and in what way I may be able to optimize the object structure in order to make serialization run faster?

Switching to JSON will help a great deal with this, as it allows easier caching.

APC will also help, just for the opcode-cache part, not for storing objects in memory.

How big is this object exactly? Could it be worth it not sending the entire thing? If you're just dealing with recordsets, you might be able to fix it in the frontend by only downloading only what the user can see, or will see in the near future.

The default serializer will iterate through every property, if a property is an object it will then iterate through each of those objects and their properties until it's done.

Since your object is complex, there's lots of crunching going on and many levels of objects that are being serialized.

As a point of optimization you may wish to look into implementing the serializable interface on your objects and serializing the minimal amount of information you require to be serialized and sent over the wire to your Flex app.

http://php.net/manual/en/class.serializable.php

When doing AMF serialization, or any serialization for that matter, it is usually better to work with smaller pieces of data if performance is a concern. By doing that you can work with individual objects as true ActionScript objects instead of just data placeholders. Smaller data when doing any type of RPC is usually better. You could use JSON instead, but then you'd loose the tight data binding that you get from using AMF. So try working with smaller packets of data using multiple HTTP requests.