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Learn Everything about PHP Performance

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

Articles worth reading

Tideways 2026.2 Release

Tideways 2026.2 Release

Product | Tideways-News

Tideways 2026.2 Release

Understanding complex request traces is one of the hardest parts of performance analysis. In this Release, we focused on making this significantly easier in Tideways. The Timeline has been redesigned to provide a clearer view of how requests are executed, with new layout modes, improved navigation, and a more consistent span model. These changes help […]
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 […]

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How to implementing cache tagging with APC or Memcache without hurting performance
PHP Performance | Tech

How to implementing cache tagging with APC or Memcache without hurting performance

Cache tagging first appeared on my radar when I started working on Doctrine ORM in 2009 and the idea sounds extremely useful in theory. With cache tagging, cache entries can be grouped together under tag names, which then allows to simply invalidate all items with the same tag.
Introducing Trace Pinning

Introducing Trace Pinning

Product | Tech

Introducing Trace Pinning

Today we are introducing a new feature called “trace pinning” which allows you to keep traces for future reference. This is a first step to improve the usability of Tideways for longer performance optimization sessions by simplyfing the steps to find traces that you have found interesting before.
Developing a time-series "database" based on HdrHistogram

Developing a time-series “database” based on HdrHistogram

Product | Tech

Developing a time-series “database” based on HdrHistogram

Over the last months we have developed, tested and rolled out a new backend for the time-series information that we collect in Tideways. In this blog post I want to explain some of the implementation details and the journey getting here and why we didn’t use one of the many existing time-series databases out there.
Tideways on Tour: MeetMagento Leipzig and Shopware Hackathon

Tideways on Tour: MeetMagento Leipzig and Shopware Hackathon

Event

Tideways on Tour: MeetMagento Leipzig and Shopware Hackathon

In July, I am on tour in Germany and hope to meet you to talk Tideways! My trip starts in the beautiful city of Leipzig at the MeetMagento DE 2016 conference from 4th-5th July and continues on to the Shopware Open Hackathon from 6th-8th July in Schöppingen. With me I will bring some of our newest improvements for both Magento and Shopware instrumentation in Tideways.
Adding CakePHP Support for CakeFest

Adding CakePHP Support for CakeFest

Product | Tech

Adding CakePHP Support for CakeFest

For this years CakeFest in Amsterdam we have finally finished native support for both CakePHP 2 and 3 in Tideways. First, we have added automatic transaction/endpoint detection based on Controller and Actions as you can see in this screenshot where we are viewing a trace for AppControllerPagesController::display of the open source project stillmaintained.
Shopware Community Day 2016

Shopware Community Day 2016

Event

Shopware Community Day 2016

Wir sind morgen am 20. Mai auch wieder auf dem Shopware Community Day in Ahaus vertreten und freuen uns wie jedes Jahr auf spannende Themen und Diskussionen.
PHP Session Garbage Collection: The unknown performance bottleneck

PHP Session Garbage Collection: The unknown performance bottleneck

PHP Performance | Tech

PHP Session Garbage Collection: The unknown performance bottleneck

Here is one performance setting in your PHP configuration you probably haven’t thought about much before: How often does PHP perform random garbage collection of outdated session data in your application? Did you know that because of the shared nothing architecture PHP randomly cleans old session data whenever session_start() is called? An operation that is not necessarily cheap.
New: Profiling PrestaShop performance
Product | Tech

New: Profiling PrestaShop performance

We have included PrestaShop 1.6 and 1.7 support in the last release of the Tideways PHP extension. If you are using Tideways with your e-commerce site based on PrestaShop, then you now get better insights for monitoring and profiling data. No changes to your code-base are necessary to get started.
Introducing Teams and Synchronization of Members from Github

Introducing Teams and Synchronization of Members from Github

Product | Tech

Introducing Teams and Synchronization of Members from Github

We are introducing “Teams” today, a new feature to improve access controls for your Tideways organization, after several weeks of testing with selected customers.