Blog

Learn Everything about PHP Performance

We at Tideways are working on PHP performance 24/7 and share this knowledge with the community.

In the Spotlight

Tideways-News

Ten years of Tideways! Thank you for being part of the journey.

10 years ago, Benjamin founded Tideways with a clear goal: support PHP developers and help build faster, more reliable websites. Since then, more than 2,000 customers have used Tideways to gain better visibility into their PHP applications. Seeing that web applications are slow without understanding why sparked an idea for Benjamin, that ultimately led to […]
Tideways 2026.3 Release

Tideways 2026.3 Release

Product

Tideways 2026.3 Release

This Release introduces AI Performance Insights, expanding the Tideways CLI with access to monitoring, exception tracking, Slow SQL, and trace data for agentic performance analysis. We added PHP 8.6 compatibility and improved trace views and instrumentation. We’ve also added a broad range of new framework- and ORM-specific bottleneck detections for Shopware, Magento, Laravel, Symfony, and […]

All blog articles

Testing a new approach to Memory Profiling in PHP with XHProf

Testing a new approach to Memory Profiling in PHP with XHProf

PHP Performance | Tech

Testing a new approach to Memory Profiling in PHP with XHProf

Memory profiling in PHP has traditionally been hard. Most memory profilers compare the memory or peak memory before and after a function call to find out how much memory usage increased or decreased. This can be achieved by calling the equivalent of memory_get_usage() and memory_get_peak_usage() functions from within the profiling extension.
Improved Time Explorer

Improved Time Explorer

PHP Performance | Tech

Improved Time Explorer

We have just rolled out an improvement to the Time Explorer, the low precision (15 minutes) chart that is rendered in the Dashboard and Application view with performance data for the complete retention period of your plan.
First-Time-Speaker-Toolkit

First-Time-Speaker-Toolkit

Event | Tideways-News

First-Time-Speaker-Toolkit

Hey there! Perhaps you read our first post about the unconference at the PHP Benelux? Then you know that we explicitly are encouraging first-time-speakers to give a talk at the unconference next weekend.
PHP Benelux - visit Tideways at the unconference

PHP Benelux – visit Tideways at the unconference

Event | Tideways-News

PHP Benelux – visit Tideways at the unconference

Are you ready for some PHP fun? In two weeks, the PHP Benelux opens it doors. For us, it is a highlight in our conference calendar. The PHP Benelux is always very well organized and its special charme is that it’s a community conference organized by engaged members of the PHP community.
Releasing New Tideways XHProf Extension

Releasing New Tideways XHProf Extension

Product | Tech

Releasing New Tideways XHProf Extension

We have just pushed the beta of a new version 5.0 of our XHProf fork to Github. It is rewritten from scatch with a modern code-base that makes use of PHP 7 internals and includes major datastructure improvements.
How does the PHP Realpath Cache work and how to configure it?

How does the PHP Realpath Cache work and how to configure it?

PHP Performance | Tech

How does the PHP Realpath Cache work and how to configure it?

The realpath cache in PHP is often overlooked and its exact workings are a bit of a mystery to many developers, fueled by a lot of explanations on the web that are just plain wrong.
Environments are back: Monitor and Trace Staging, QA and Dev Servers

Environments are back: Monitor and Trace Staging, QA and Dev Servers

PHP Performance | Tech

Environments are back: Monitor and Trace Staging, QA and Dev Servers

We think monitoring and tracing should be performed across the whole application lifecycle and that it should be easy to compare changes between production, staging/QA and production environments.
Using php-fpm as a simple built-in async queue

Using php-fpm as a simple built-in async queue

PHP Performance | Tech

Using php-fpm as a simple built-in async queue

There are many tasks that a web-request should not perform directly so the user doesn’t have to wait many seconds for a response. Examples include sending emails, uploading images to a CDN, resizing images or making expensive call to external services and many more depending on your use-case.
Improved Dashboard with Preview Chart and Recent Performance Metrics

Improved Dashboard with Preview Chart and Recent Performance Metrics

PHP Performance | Product | Tech

Improved Dashboard with Preview Chart and Recent Performance Metrics

We have improved the dashboard in Tideways to include preview charts with the last 24 hours of performance data and the performance of the most recent 15 minute interval. This provides you with a much better overview of all your applications and by selecting any time range in the preview chart you can directly jump to a time-range that interests you.