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For our first Release in 2025, we have cooked up more precise performance insights for you and can now, with Automatic Bottleneck Detection, serve you bottlenecks on a silver platter including recipes on how to fix them. Work on several improvements, like Native Worker Support in the PHP Extension, has kept us busy over the winter. A series of instrumentation improvements has chased away the winter blues and is now making way for a spring full of user-friendliness.

When PHP 7 came into the market, a lot of improvements were made in error handling. This is because PHP 7 used a robust model to catch exceptions and errors. The latest version, PHP 8 builds on the same improvements along with additional enhancements and features. Handling errors in PHP with try catch blocks is almost the same as handling errors in other programming languages. When a PHP exception is thrown, the PHP runtime looks for a catch statement that can handle that type of exception.

PHP is one of the most widely used server-side scripting languages, driving a significant portion of the web. As websites grow in complexity and traffic, optimizing PHP for performance and scalability becomes essential. PHP FPM (FastCGI Process Manager), is a tool designed to enhance PHP's efficiency. In this blog, we will explore what PHP FPM is, how it works, and why it is essential for modern web applications.

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.

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.

In the last few years, there has been a lot of movement around new and exciting PHP testing tools. While this is great news, stepping back a little and understanding the underlying concepts before jumping in is vital to writing great PHP tests. When we talk about testing tools and methodologies, we're referring to automated testing tools. Writing code that tests your PHP apps is a great way to build confidence that your application will behave as you expect.

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.