With programming, things aren't always what they seem. In fact, sometimes more is less. More specifically, sometimes we get better performance by doing the opposite of what we've learned is right. Let's explore an example and how it applies to cloud-scale systems and big data.

Originally published in 2012, this was my first published article, a guest post for MSDN covering some of the tricks we found for optimizing and improving the performance of PHP with classic Web and Worker Roles on Azure. With the original post having since been removed from MSDN, the contents are now posted here for anyone interested in understanding this older Azure technology.