Magento Performance hosting Optimization suggestions

There are an wide range of options one can use for optimizing the performance of the magento application. It ranges from OS performance tweaks which are different from both Linux type or if it is running on either Windows or Unix/Linux. And to the way that webserver and browsers communicates caching implementations.In this post i will try and address some of the options for magento performance optimization. These optimizations can also change from either running and old version of magento ecommerce. < 1.2.x or latest version 1.4.x. And even change when running Magento enterprise edition with Full Page caching enabled.Install Fooman Speedsterhttp://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/457/fooman-speedsterThis extension should be installed. AFTER finishing customizations of the MAgento Store. Because it does confuse designers working on the store while in development. The CSS & JS files are addressed, as suggested by Yahoo.Enable Gzip Compression & deflate in .htaccess.

To do this, uncomment this part in the .htacess:
#php_flag zlib.output_compression on

Howto: remove the "#" and save the .htaccess file again.On a standard Magento Demo Store. You are able to gain up to 80% compression.PHP opcode Caching.Magento is written in PHP. Which needs to be compiled into byte code. If there is no caching of this each php file needs to be "compiled" by the webserver. And that is nessecary regardless of weather your site is running on Apache, lighttpd, nginx or others.There are differnt implementations of Opcode caching for PHP. Typically Xcache, APC and eAccelerator.All provides mechanism for cache the compiled version of the php file. Which means that your server only need to compile it once. on the next request. It simply fetches the precompiled php from memory. And overall the performance og the magento store has increased.