PHP Extension 5.38.0 released

  • Improvement: All Symfony Kernel lifecycle methods are now instrumented (preBoot, boot, shutdown, terminate), providing better insight where time is spent, particularly for a cold container cache.
  • Improvement: Create full spans for Symfony Kernel lifecycle methods, which improves visibility when multiple (sub)requests are processed in a single transaction.
  • Improvement: Enable instrumentation for Symfony components before Kernel::handle(). This provides more insight in early Symfony bootstrap and allows to use individual components, such as Symfony’s event dispatcher, outside of Symfony projects.
  • Improvement: Events for Laravel now create full spans and support the event.listener_count annotation.
  • Improvement: Magento 2 blocks and templates now create full spans.
  • Bugfix: Fix the detection of the script name when relative paths of the form directory/script.php are executed. Previously the script name would erroneously show as directory.

About the author

Tim Düsterhus

I’m a Software Engineer at Tideways, where I work on the PHP extension. My focus is on helping developers gain accurate insights into the runtime behavior of their applications with minimal overhead.

I’m interested in PHP internals and regularly contribute performance improvements to the PHP engine. I enjoy working on problems where small changes can have a measurable impact on the performance and efficiency of PHP applications. Several of my performance optimizations have become part of PHP itself, helping improve the language for developers worldwide.