To securely handle API keys on the server side, consider using environment variables to store sensitive information, avoiding hardcoding in the application code.
Engineering teams building high-throughput systems know that scaling infrastructure is never just about speed, it's about resilience. At extreme volumes, even widely adopted tools can become bottlenecks.
Implementing caching mechanisms like OPcache or Memcached significantly reduces PHP execution time by storing precompiled scripts and accelerating data retrieval from the database.