title: Performance issue with Zend Framework
body: <p>I added Zend Framework to my php project 1 month ago. I am using Zend_Measure and Zend_Locale for formatting the numbers to the good locale.</p>
  
  <p>I am using php 5.3 with APC and Zend Framework 1.11.</p>
  
  <p>I have a major issue with the export of raw data from my database. Excluding the mysql query time which is negligible the php export with formatting of the records takes 3.5 seconds per 1000 records. All this time is spend in <code>Zend_Locale_Format::toNumber()</code>. How can I improve the performance of this?</p>
  
  <p>This benchmark has been done on my own computer (Macbook pro i5). 
  On our production server it take 70 seconds per 1000 records!!! This server is a 2GB rackspaceCloud Cloud server with centos and only our web application running.</p>
  
  <p>There is a 20 factor between the macbook and the rackspace server performance. Is my macbook so powerful? I don't think so...</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>UPDATE</p>
  
  <p>After doing some profiling it appear that the bottleneck is <code>Zend_Cache_Backend_File-&gt;_fileGetContents</code>. It use by default Zend_Cache_Backend_File. How can I configure Zend Framework to use <code>Zend_Cache_Backend_Apc</code> or <code>Zend_Cache_Backend_TwoLevels</code>? It could maybe improve the performance...</p>