A few weeks ago, Andrey from Ecommlab contacted me to ask me about a strategy to get performance insights from Tideways into Shopware 6 checkout. The store of our joint customer “Bär Schuhe” was slow for customers during the order confirmation process.

This is the story of the manufacturing of seven-league boots for a function that is responsible for processing XML/HTML data in the PHP library. Optimizations in the PHP standard library, like here in ext/dom, have the potential to speed up the performance of applications significantly by an upgrade to the current PHP version.

You can now unpack the Christmas present that was promised to you at the end of 2023! As you may have already read in the Flamegraph Feature Preview, this exciting new feature of the Profiler is now the focus of our first release in 2024. The Flamegraph complements the Timeline and Callgraph features and visualizes Aggregated Traces. The goal was to provide profiling information across many traces and thereby gaining new and deeper insights into performance.

As a founding member and major contributor to the success of the PHP Foundation, Tideways sponsored the Foundation with 12,000 USD in 2023. As a member of the administrative board of the PHP Foundation, the advancement of the open source language PHP is key for us. In the founding year, we supported the Foundation with 10,000 USD and followed this up in 2022 with another 15,000 USD. As a major sponsor, it is our declared goal to uphold our commitment to PHP and the foundation.

As a Christmas present, we have started rolling out a new feature for the Profiler: flamegraph rendering in addition to the existing Timeline and Callgraph. This is a feature preview and will see more changes in Q1 of 2024. For now, only customers with the most recent plans (Tideways 6) can access them, or you can view them in traces of the „demo“ organization. Let us know what you think of it!

Since our last release announcement in April we have been working on a number of new features for Tideways that we are now happy to share with you. This is the second and final release for 2023. From here the team will be looking ahead to 2024, the 10th anniversary of Tideways’ launch, and preparing some amazing new features and improvements.

90% of the time when I explain how the stat cache works in PHP, people are surprised because they expected it to work differently. It was invented to solve a very limited problem when you call several file system related operations on the same file in quick succession. Why should you know how it works? Because sometimes you need to work around the cache with the clearstatcache() function to get PHP code to run without errors.

In the 4 months since the last release (2022.4), we have been working on a number of new features and improvements that we are pleased to share with you today as part of our 2023.1 release of Tideways. In addition to the new features, we also revamped our pricing and plans at the end of March under the umbrella of “Tideways 6”. The main difference is that all plans now include all features and are now limited by transactions as the primary metric. Summary.

Now that 2022 is over, its time to review newsworthy topics about performance in the PHP language. As this is the first time we are doing this type of blog post, please let us know your thoughts about this format and if we forgot important topics.

In this blog post I want to share a story of a performance bottleneck using the filesystem that we experienced in our development setup. In the Tideways backend, we have a simple homegrown database migration tool that scans a directory for.sql files and applies them if not already done. It is a very old piece of code that I used since before the times of doctrine/migrations. It is much simpler but works for us.