Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

In our fourth Release of 2025, we included PHP 8.5 support on the day of its release and Heartbeats to monitor your application’s pulse more closely than ever. If something is offbeat, you’ll receive timely alerts. We improved alerting by introducing fine-granular transaction level response time and made automatic tracepoint triggers more powerful.

Each year, right on schedule, a new version of PHP is released at the end of November. So, how much faster is this new release across popular frameworks and applications? Our tests show that, in general, the performance between 8.2, 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5 does not move much for a Laravel, Symfony and WordPress demo application. Moving to the newest PHP version isn’t a magic shortcut to better performance. Not everything is bleak, though.

The close of 2025 is near, and that also means a new version of PHP is about to be released: 8.5! There has already been some discussion regarding the latest features and modifications affecting developers, for example on Laravel News, PHP.Watch or the Zend Blog. In this post we are highlighting just the performance, debugging, and operations-related changes in PHP 8.5 that you will not find in the posts listed above. Several of these changes were even contributed by Tideways employees.

We are noticing that some of our requests are starting to get slow and server load increases. Checking the process list of our server, for example with htop reveals that our FPM workers are taking up all of our CPU time. Checking the health with our basic toolset of lsof to show open network connections and strace to show syscalls does not reveal any activity. This means that the workers are spending time processing data without any externally visible activity.

The database is often the source of performance problems in PHP applications, but there are many different reasons why this is the case. The most straightforward is that individual queries that the application issues are slow, due to their inefficient structure, by not using indexes or other coding mistakes. But for MySQL databases, a common problem is also the misconfiguration of the server itself.