The year 2024 was special for us in several respects. It’s been a decade since the unveiling of Tideways’ predecessor, and we’ve come a long way since then. We would like to express gratitude to our customers, partners, colleagues, friends, and family for their ongoing support and dedication. Without you, we wouldn’t be where we are today. We are particularly pleased to be able to welcome many new partners this year.

We recently helped our customer Holocafé prepare its Laravel application for a TV appearance on the German edition of Dragons’ Den (Höhle der Löwen) and the corresponding peak in traffic. The primary change was to utilize Cloudflare as an HTTP reverse proxy to cache the main page of the site and a few other mostly static pages that users were most likely to click on. The expectation was that 80-90% of the curious users could be served with pages from the HTTP cache.

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. Several of these changes were even contributed by Tideways.

In applications that use closures excessively, understanding stack traces as part of the debugging experience has historically been complicated by the fact that the names of closures did not include the source location. In a PHP stack trace, whenever a frame was represented by a closure, it only contained the reference {closure} and the namespace the closure was declared in, leading to all closures within a namespace looking identical.

Every so often, a careful profiling analysis of your application detects the bottleneck in third-party code and there is little remedy for you to override or change that code. In this blog post I want to present a solution to fixing performance problems in third-party libraries by using the composer patches plugin. I use the the Symfony ErrorHandler as an example.

We strive to improve clarity and user-friendliness, and have thus focused our efforts on several features that align with this objective. Our new Sidebar Menu, the Release Tracking Feature and an increased comparison range for Releases and Markers as well as the possibility to show error messages in notifications all fall into this category. Summary.

Tideways is joining the Open Source Pledge because we want to make a public commitment on our various open source contributions. Not only do we rely on open source software in our product Tideways, we are also building our business on top of the open source language PHP and its continued success. The mission of the recently started Open Source Pledge initiative is to establish a new social norm in the tech industry of companies paying Open Source maintainers.

One of our recurring jobs at Tideways is to ensure that all of our instrumentation works with the new and upcoming PHP versions. For us, “working” doesn’t just mean that the results are correct, but that your PHP extension is fast, gathering insights for our customers with a minimal performance overhead.

The upcoming PHP 8.4 release will include the brand-new feature “property hooks”, a mechanism to add logic to a class property when read from or written to. One benefit of this feature is that you do not need to protect property access with a private property and public getter/setter methods anymore. You can find out how this feature works in the RFC and other places, but in the spirit of this blog we want to focus solely on the performance implications.

Sometimes, performance is the primary requirement when you are picking a third-party library to solve a task in your application. For CPU intensive work, there are often similar alternatives that you can choose from: To find out which one of them is more performant for your use-case, you can set up an experiment with microtime/hr_time calls and run them against each other. But: this provides fewer insights than running your tests directly with a Profiler such as XHProf or Tideways!