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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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Launching Tideways with transparent and flexible pricing

Launching Tideways with transparent and flexible pricing

Product | Tideways-News

Launching Tideways with transparent and flexible pricing

We are excited to launch the first version of Tideways to the general public this week along with a new pricing model.
Three Fully Functional Demo Applications

Three Fully Functional Demo Applications

Product | Tech

Three Fully Functional Demo Applications

Tideways stands for smart and efficient profiling. To offer first-time-users an easy access, we incorporated a lot of feedback to simplify the installation.
Tideways at PHPUG and IPC Berlin

Tideways at PHPUG and IPC Berlin

Event

Tideways at PHPUG and IPC Berlin

The PHP Usergroup Berlin invited me to give a short introducting about “Profiling with Tideways” at their IPC Special Edition next 9th June. I will present a short demo and answer any questions you might have.
Trace Timelines Public Preview Available

Trace Timelines Public Preview Available

Product | Tech

Trace Timelines Public Preview Available

We are happy to release a first public preview of Trace Timelines for Linux today that we unveiled two weeks ago. You can find the PHP Extension v2.0.3 on the downloads page. Please note that this a preview and there might still be bugs.
Tideways Update: On Timelines

Tideways Update: On Timelines

Product | Tech

Tideways Update: On Timelines

Tobias and I have been super busy the last weeks adding more features to Tideways. With new customers joining our awesome group of early adopters every month we can now invest more time working on Tideways. Most of the current work is building new features from scratch which is why it takes so much time compared to previous iterations on the Profiler.
Qafoo Profiler is now Tideways

Qafoo Profiler is now Tideways

Product | Tideways-News

Qafoo Profiler is now Tideways

Today we are unveiling our new product name Tideways replacing the working title Qafoo Profiler.
Heatmaps in Weekly Report

Heatmaps in Weekly Report

Product | Tech

Heatmaps in Weekly Report

Changes to the weekly mail were already planend for a long time and now we are pushing them forward with heatmaps as an additional tool to find periods of slow response times. The heatmap will show the response time (95% percentile) of all your applications for each hour of the last seven days.
Using Tideways with HHVM

Using Tideways with HHVM

Product | Tech

Using Tideways with HHVM

Note 2018 We have discontinued support for Tideways on HHVM, because there wasn’t enough interest from customers, with all the new features since 2015, our HHVM support was not at the same level as our PHP support and with HHVMs teams decision to move away from PHP.
Detecting Bottlenecks: Blocking Session

Detecting Bottlenecks: Blocking Session

Product | Tech

Detecting Bottlenecks: Blocking Session

PHP uses a file-based session store by default that conveniently works out of the box. However file-based sessions can introduce a serious bottleneck when used with parallel (AJAX-) requests. PHP locks each session file during session_start() until the request ends, preventing concurrent access to the same session at the same time. A blocked request waits at session_start() until previous requests release the lock.