You finish writing your code and launch your application. Then, you begin experiencing performance issues. How can you fix this? It doesn’t matter how talented your development team is, every code should always be analyzed, debugged, and reviewed to make it run faster. What you need is a performance profiling tool. In this article, you will learn about performance profiling and how to determine the best performance profiling tools for your software.

In modern software development and operations, everything can be monitored. This isn’t a matter of technology. If you want to monitor something, you can. However, modern monitoring tools come with a price, and while sometimes that price isn’t too high, at other times the cost can be unbearable. For example, an APM tool that monitors your server’s health with CPU and memory metrics is pretty cheap and non-intrusive.

According to the Stackoverflow survey of 2019, Python programming language garnered 73.1% approval among developers. It ranks second to Rust and continues to dominate in Data Science and Machine Learning(ML). Python is a developers’ favorite. It is a high-level language known for its robustness and its core philosophy―simplicity over complexity. However, Python application’s performance is another story. Just like any other application, it has its share of performance issues.

This Summer Release of Tideways builds on the previous Beta Announcements in May's Spring Release and marks the general availability of This new functionality is fully available by updating the Tideways PHP Extension to version 5.2.4 and the Daemon to version 1.6.18. In addition to rolling out new features, we also renamed the concept of "Application" in Tideways to "Project" and we provide a detailed explanation why at the end of this post.

We are releasing a new stable minor version of the Tideways PHP extension 5.1 today, which will include a few new features that we have been writing about before and a few new ones that we have cooked up in the last few weeks.

We have just released the PHP Extension version 5.0.62 which includes a new feature, instrumentation for GraphQL queries made using the webonyx/graphql-php package, the most widespread GraphQL server package for PHP, for example by Magento 2.

The PHP INI setting memory_limit is important to configure right for two reasons. To help you finding the right memory_limit setting Tideways now offers two additional ways to see the maximum memory in use.

All Tideways applications with a Pro license can now create additional production Environments in addition to the one that is available by default. Configuring a second or more environments as "production" effects the retention and the traces/minute collected for these environments. By default non-production environments have just 1 day of retention and 1 trace/minute.

Tideways history functionality is still mostly based on the features available 4 years ago, before we introduced Services and Environments, Downstream Layers and many others. Time for a redesign of the history to include support for all the features and data that are available now. By using the UI elements from the performance overview our we also introduce a familiar look and feel, where the previous history screen used its own widgets.

The PHP community is large and diverse in their approach to build and run PHP applications. We have seen hundreds of small applications running on a handful of servers and one product running on multiple clusters and hundreds of servers across the globe. Still, we believe all PHP applications regardless of size benefit from monitoring, profiling and exception tracking functionality.