Speeding up PHP

[MrApples]

I'm am embarking into the world of template systems ( turns out Conditionals are incredibly easy to do... ), and one of the things I'd like to try is a light PHP optimizer. I'm not talking about an accelerator, but a PHP script which optimized PHP files directly.

So what is considered 'faster' with PHP? So far I have (guessing)

Remove all comments (human conveniences)
Remove all ' ', '\t', '\n' (human conveniences)
Preferably use ' over " with strings. (PHP ignores ')
Rename all variables and functions to shortest possible, aa, ab .. ZQ (from C++)
Replace == with ===, != with !==, etc. (from Javascript)
If 1 line If-Then-Else, remove brackets (not sure)
Recycle variables wherever possible. (hard)
Replace all $var++ and $var-- with ++$var, --$var.
Replace strlen checks with isset($var{length})

I am guessing embing user-functions directly into the code is actually slower for PHP as it has to compile. Please remember I am a nub.

[Dismounted]

You might as well try XCache as it compiles all the code beforehand and caches it, and will benefit you more than making code hell to read.

Also, some of the things you suggest will break functionality under certain conditions, such as "Replace == with ===, != with !==, etc.". It won't make code any faster, and those operators have different meanings.