Workshop: PHP profiling

Workshop: PHP profiling

Workshop for PHP developers by Dmytro Naumenko. The workshop will be held in Russian.

Short intro

This workshop is a deep dive into PHP profiling world. We will learn how profilers work and how to use them, then we will install an app with prepared pitfalls, profile it and ensure that 15x performance improvement with one changed line is more than real!

Details

This workshop is a deep dive into the PHP profiling world. We will start with a talk on what is profiling, what problems it solves, how it actually works, and what profiling tools do we have in PHP. Then we will install Blackfire on participants’ laptops so we are ready to defeat all the bottlenecks!

The main part of workshop is about getting a hands-on profiling experience, so I have prepared a sample project with different bottlenecks, hidden in deeply in the code. We will start from a sample bottleneck and start exploring Blackfire, its toolset and features, learn how to read callgraphs, how to find the root of a problem, apply changes and compare dramatically changing performance metrics.

We’ll learn different traps and tricks of profiling on a series of practical examples, that cover different yet common mistakes that lead to performance problem. Finally, we will discover ways to ensure application performance on long-term run by writing performance tests. At the end of the day you will have deep understanding and practical experience in applications profiling, applicable to your projects in real life.

Prerequisites

To attend this workshop you will need a laptop with prepared development environment, that includes:

• PHP 7.2 binaries with PDO SQLite extension installed and enabled (wrapping in Docker/k8s/Vagrant are not recommended for this workshop)
• Root permissions (we’ll need them to install Blackfire during workshop)
• Your favourite IDE or code editor
• An SQLite client (PhpStorm already includes it)