How to get zendx_jquery_form_element_autocomplete to respond in real time

Were I work for a living now, they use Zend Framework and zendx_jquery_form_element_autocomplete. It's slow, and definitely not responding in real time. A quick test with Firebug shows a median response time of 300 ms. Far from the 200 ms needed to make it appear instantaneous.
Everyone says the database is slow, I didn't take it further at first.

But, yes, the whole thing is slow. Something was missing an index, which I added, but the time gains were very slim. I found that suspicious. It's not a big deal, it's an application with few users, so I concentrated on the auto-complete part, which is worth optimizing.

The index was right, the code was ok, and it took 300 ms. It has to be the database. Or slow machine executing the code. I blindly tried xcache, it saved about 100 ms. Or, well, there was something else going on.

I decided to bypass everything and wrote a very simple script, doing the bare query, printing in json the result array, along the line of this:


// Connection and database selection

$query = "SELECT name FROM table WHERE name LIKE '" . mysql_real_escape ($_REQUEST['term']) . "%'";

$my_res = mysql_query ($query);

$result = array ();
while ($item = mysql_fetch_array ($my_res))
    $result[] = $item['name'];

print json_encode ($result);
 
 
And I ran the thing in Firebug. Tadam... It suddenly took only 6 ms. Right, that's a 50 fold time gain.

Is it clean ? No, not really. Is Zend Framework slowing your applications ? Well, now you know how to deal with that one issue which matters.