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Collin O' Dell, member of the PHP League, shares how he was able to significantly improve the performance his json5 package using Blackfire profiling.

Back in November I released colinodell/json5 - a JSON5 parser for PHP. It's essentially a drop-in replacement for PHP's json_decode() function, but it allows things like comments, trailing commas, and more.

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I always knew that a PHP-based implementation would be slower than PHP's native C implementation, but execution time measured in minutes was completely unacceptable!

So I fired up Blackfire (which I've previously used to optimize league/commonmark) and got to work.

https://www.colinodell.com/blog/201801/optimizing-colinodelljson5-blackfire

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In a post on vuejsdevelopers.com Anthony Gore explains how to get started with serverside rending with Laravel and Vue. Cool stuff!

Server-side rendering is great way to increase the perception of loading speed in your full-stack app. Users get a complete page with visible content when they load your site, as opposed to an empty page that doesn’t get populated until JavaScript runs.

One of the downsides of using Laravel as a backend for Vue.js was the inability to server render your code. Was. The release of Vue.js 2.5.0 has brought server-side rendering support to non-Node.js environments including PHP, Python, Ruby etc.

In this tutorial, I’ll take you through the set up steps for Laravel and demonstrate a simple server-rendered app. Get the code for this here on Github.

https://vuejsdevelopers.com/2017/11/06/vue-js-laravel-server-side-rendering/

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My colleague Brent is currently creating a new package called spatie/async. This one will let you easily do some asynchronous parallel processing in PHP. In a new post on his blog Brent explains why we are creating the package and compares it to a few other solutions out there.

If you're into parallel PHP, you probably heard of Amp and ReactPHP. Our package aims not to compete with those two, as it only solves one tiny aspect of parallelism in PHP. We did however use both the packages to run some benchmarks against. Let's take a look at the results.

https://www.stitcher.io/blog/asynchronous-php

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Using regular UUIDs stored as a text-based primary key is very slow. Our newly released package spatie/laravel-binary-uuid aims to solve that by binary storing a slightly tweaked version of the UUID. My colleague Brent wrote a blogpost describing how it works behind the scenes. He also included some interesting benchmarks.

The binary encoding of UUIDs solved most of the issue. There's one extra step to take though, which allows MySQL to even better index this field. By switching some of the bits in the UUID, more specifically time related data, we're able to save them in a more ordered way. And it seems that MySQL is especially fond of ordered data when creating indices.

https://www.stitcher.io/blog/optimised-uuids-in-mysql

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In a new blogpost published at Sitepoint, Christopher Pitt explores the various ways you can handle reading big files in PHP.

Though this isn’t a problem we frequently suffer from, it’s easy to mess up when working with large files. In asynchronous applications, it’s just as easy to bring the whole server down when we’re not careful about memory usage.

This tutorial has hopefully introduced you to a few new ideas (or refreshed your memory about them), so that you can think more about how to read and write large files efficiently. When we start to become familiar with streams and generators, and stop using functions like file_get_contents: an entire category of errors disappear from our applications. That seems like a good thing to aim for!

https://www.sitepoint.com/performant-reading-big-files-php/

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Probably you know that that keeping the disk & transfer size of a JavaScript file low is pretty important. But have you considered the time needed to parse and compile the code? In this great post on Medium Addy Osmani, an engineer at Google, explains the complete cost of having JavaScript on your page.

As we build sites more heavily reliant on JavaScript, we sometimes pay for what we send down in ways that we can’t always easily see. In this post, I’ll cover why a little discipline can help if you’d like your site to load & be interactive quickly on mobile devices. tl;dr: less code = less parse/compile + less transfer + less to decompress

https://medium.com/dev-channel/the-cost-of-javascript-84009f51e99e

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yes is a Unix command that will spit out and infinite stream of y's. In a post on his blog Matthias Endler, an engineer at trivago, shares that there's more than meets the eye to make this happen in a performant way.

The trivial program yes turns out not to be so trivial after all. It uses output buffering and memory alignment to improve performance. Re-implementing Unix tools is fun and makes me appreciate the nifty tricks, which make our computers fast.

https://matthias-endler.de/2017/yes/

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PhpStorm is a fantastic editor. Unfortunately it can be quite slow. Brent, one of our developers at Spatie, blogged a few tips to make it run a bit faster. I've followed all his suggestions and PhpStorm now feels a bit more responsive.

I didn't start this post by writing my own thoughts, because I figured people were looking for some quick tips to speed of their IDE. As a PHP developer, I think that PhpStorm is such a powerful tool, which helps me to write good and maintainable code. I don't want it to stand in my way though, so good performance is an absolute requirement.

https://www.stitcher.io/blog/phpstorm-performance

Hopefully future versions of PhpStorm will be more performant out of the box.

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On his blog Mathias Bynens explains the differences under the hood between async/await and vanilla promises.

The fundamental difference between await and vanilla promises is that await X() suspends execution of the current function, while promise.then(X) continues execution of the current function after adding the X call to the callback chain. In the context of stack traces, this difference is pretty significant. ... Enable JavaScript engines to handle stack traces in a more performant and memory-efficient manner by following these recommendations:

• Prefer async/await over desugared promises.
• Use babel-preset-env to avoid transpiling async/await unnecessarily. ...

https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/async-stack-traces

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Addy Osmani, a Google Chrome engineer, recently published a e-book on image optimization. You can read it in it's entirety here: https://images.guide/

Images take up massive amounts of internet bandwidth because they often have large file sizes. According to the HTTP Archive, 60% of the data transferred to fetch a web page is images composed of JPEGs, PNGs and GIFs. As of July 2017, images accounted for 1.7MB of the content loaded for the 3.0MB average site.

Per Tammy Everts, adding images to a page or making existing images larger have been proven to increase conversion rates. It's unlikely that images will go away and so investing in an efficient compression strategy to minimize bloat becomes important.

If you need to optimize images in your PHP application take a look at our image optimization package. If you're a Laravel user you'll be happy to know that there's also a Laravel version of the optimizer. Our Laravel Medialibrary also comes with built-in support for optimizing images.

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To view some real time statistics of your server you use top or htop. But there's a new new kid on the block: gtop. It looks pretty nice.

https://github.com/aksakalli/gtop

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In an older post on his blog Mohamed Said demonstrates how you can leverage virtual columns to speed up queries on data stored as JSON.

Laravel 5.3 is shipped with built-in support for updating and querying JSON type database fields, the support currently fully covers MySQL 5.7 JSON type fields updates and lookups,

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Let's see how we may create a generated column to store users favorite color for later indexing.

https://themsaid.com/laravel-mysql-json-colum-fast-lookup-20160709

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Adam Silver lists a bunch of problems you need to solve if you opt to build a single page application.

Ironically, SPAs are harder to design and harder to build. And yet, they typically produce slow, disagreeable experiences for users. ... Javascript is never going to beat the browser at what it does best—browsing. We can still give users rich and enhanced experiences without cramming an entire site into one document.

We should let the browser manage the browsing experience, and spend our time solving real user problems.

https://adamsilver.io/articles/the-disadvantages-of-single-page-applications/

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Logan Henson, a developer at Tighten, wrote a new post on the company blog about MySQL's cool ST_Distance_Sphere function.

On a client project recently, we had to make it easy to filter database query results based on the distance between a user and an entity in our database. It's easy to get overwhelmed in that context, worrying about the crazy amount of PHP calculations you're going to have to run. ... If you need to calculate this, you can actually get surprisingly far by just using MySQL!

https://tighten.co/blog/a-mysql-distance-function-you-should-know-about

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Like this simple new addition coming in Laravel 5.4.28, it's handy for when you need to eager-load related models of a collection on the go. pic.twitter.com/0W3hqG97BR

— Mohamed Said (@themsaid) June 21, 2017

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Chris Fideo, of Servers For Hackers and Shipping Docker, published a new free video serious on optimizing performance for Laravel apps. He shows how to use the built in artisan commands such as config:cache and route:cache,how to optimize queries, build up good indexes and how to add an object cache in a clean way.

There are some super common reasons your Laravel app might be slow. This course shows you how to avoid speed issues with simple changes you can implement immediately.

https://serversforhackers.com/laravel-perf

Chris is also a working on a paid course on how to scale Laravel apps. If you want to stay in the loop for that one, subscribe to his newsletter.

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