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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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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.
Elasticsearch Outage analyzed

Elasticsearch Outage analyzed

Tech

Elasticsearch Outage analyzed

Yesterday morning the Profiler didn’t show data in the user-interface for about 7 hours. No data was lost, the workers just stopped importing while Elasticsearch went unresponsive.
Histograms are back

Histograms are back

Product | Tech

Histograms are back

Histograms are available again to all customers starting today. The stability of this feature has been tested by several customers in the last weeks.
Filtering Callgraphs

Filtering Callgraphs

Product | Tech

Filtering Callgraphs

After our holiday break in December we are happy to introduce the first new feature of 2015. We are starting small with the addition of filtering options for callgraphs.
Environments Revisited

Environments Revisited

Product | Tech

Environments Revisited

We have revisited the “Environments” feature of the Profiler and are stopping to collect performance data on non-production environments. With this change the user-experience becomes much better, because we can now always display the production data graphs. The environment switch dropdown was removed from the UI.
New Extension Release: Auto-Start Profiler

New Extension Release: Auto-Start Profiler

Product | Tech

New Extension Release: Auto-Start Profiler

We released an important milestone with the Tideways Profiler extension today. The new version allows you to start profiling and monitoring your applications without any code modifications. Documentation and setup guides will be adjusted to reflect this much simpler installation in the next days.
Chrome Extension to Start Tracing

Chrome Extension to Start Tracing

Product | Tech

Chrome Extension to Start Tracing

We are releasing a Chrome extension for Tideways today. The extension allows you to force the collection of traces for all requests of your current browser session with the push of a button, instead of having to wait for a random trace to be sampled.
We open the Beta for everyone today!

We open the Beta for everyone today!

Product | Tideways-News

We open the Beta for everyone today!

Six month ago the first line of code was written. Now we are finally opening the beta registration to everyone. Read the press release on our company blog.