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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.

In the web development world, speed and performance are must-haves. Whether you're building a static website, software-as-a-service (SaaS), or bespoke web software, it's important that everything loads quickly to keep your users happy. One of the most common ways to optimize for speed in Laravel is caching. Caching refers to the practice of storing data inside a "cache" or high-speed storage layer.

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!

When using MySQL and InnoDB you will inevitably run into lock timeouts sometime, somewhere. We have recently started seeing this with some of our Shopware 6 customers in their storefronts or worker queues, so I was reminded to go back to 2017 in our codebase when we put a fix in place. In our case, this happened on tables that were constantly written to from many different sources in the code base.

Get the cake, Tideways is turning ten! Exactly on this day ten years ago, we lifted the veil on Tideways’ predecessor and thus began our exciting journey that continues to this day. We would like to celebrate by presenting interesting new features to you. Summary: Don’t miss out on our webinar that will guide you through these new features, taking place July 3rd starting at 3 pm.

When building web applications in PHP, there may be times when you want to add metadata to annotate your code that can be read by other parts of your application. For example, if you've ever used PHPUnit to write tests for your PHP code, you'll have likely used the @test annotation to mark a method as a test in a DocBlock. Traditionally, annotations like this have been added to code using DocBlocks. However, as of PHP 8.0, you can use attributes instead to annotate your code in a more structured way.

PHPs compiler and bytecode cache OPcache not only cache the compile step from PHP source code to virtual machine bytecode, they also include optimizations that can produce faster bytecode: For example PHP can: For PHP 8.4 Tideways sponsored the work of our colleague Tim to add another compiler optimization for the function sprintf().

A widespread issue developers run into when building applications is grouping and organizing code correctly so that it is easier for other developers to understand and collaborate. Conflicting class names, functions, and other code blocks is an issue for developers, and PHP offers a way to tackle this problem by adding namespaces to the language in PHP 5.3. In this article, you will learn everything you need to know to start using namespaces to organize your code efficiently in PHP.

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.

Everything you do when using computers is related to files and folders. The browser you're using to view this webpage is a file on your device, and this webpage is a file on this website's server, which means everything is a file one way or another. In this article, you will learn everything you need to know to build files and folder-related features in your PHP applications.