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The close of 2024 is near, and that also means a new version of PHP is about to be released: 8.4! There has already been some discussion regarding the latest features and modifications affecting developers, for example on either stitcher.io or php.watch. We wrote this post with a totally different angle, highlighting the performance, debugging, and operations-related changes in PHP 8.4 that are usually less publicized. If you are here to find out: Is PHP 8.4 faster than previous versions?

In our third Release of 2025, you’ll uncover new ways to correlate data, debug critical bottlenecks, and streamline your workflow. Over the last few months, we have been working on powerful new features and refinements for you; designed to give you more in-depth visibility, more automation, and smoother workflows. We’ve added Performance Correlation in our service overview, so you can now spot dependencies and degradations system-wide at a glance.

How does your Magento 2 store’s PHP backend performance compare to other operators of Magento in general? To answer this question, we have aggregated and anonymized performance data from over 70 Magento 2 stores over the last quarter and computed benchmark numbers to compare to for the most important page types: Product details, Category Page, Search, and Homepage.

Every once in a while when browsing through open-source code, you will probably have come across internal functions that are either imported implicitly with use function array_map; like here in Doctrine or prefixed with the global namespace separator, for example \is_string($foo) like in Symfony. Curious beings as we are, you might wonder as did I: Why are they doing this? Do function calls not automatically fall back into the global namespace?

Autoloading performance affects every PHP application. And no, it’s not a solved problem just because Composer handles autoloading for you nowadays. In fact, for large applications like Magento, Shopware, or those based on Symfony or Laravel, autoloading can turn into a major performance bottleneck. More than 100 ms per request is not uncommon, caused by one of these common mistakes: Let’s break it down.