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Mark Baker made some fascinating benchmarks on the performance of PHP 7's anonymous classes.

A week or so ago, I published an article entitled “In Search of an Anonymous Class Factory” about my efforts at writing a “factory” for PHP7’s new Anonymous Classes (extending a named concrete base class, and assigning Traits to it dynamically); and about how I subsequently discovered the expensive memory demands of my original factory code, and then rewrote it using a different and (hopefully) more memory-efficient approach.

Since then, I’ve run some tests for memory usage and timings to assess just how inefficient my first attempt at the factory code was, and whether the new version of the factory really was better than the original.

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A few weeks ago Gabriela D'Ávila helped a famous guy with getting an MySQL import down from 16 to 6 minutes. In a post on her blog she explains how that was done.

A few weeks ago my friend Frank de Jonge told me he managed to improve an import into a MySQL server down from more than 10 hours to 16 minutes. According to him it had something to do with one of the field types (too long fields to really small data) and the amount of indexes and constraints in the tables. We were talking about 1 million records here. He wondered if it was possible to make it even faster.

...

Turns out there are many ways of importing data into a database, it all depends where are you getting the data from and where you want to put it.

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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configuration you probably haven't thought about much before: How often does PHP perform random garbage collection of outdated session data in your application?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.

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Brendan Gregg, a Netflix engineer, gave this talk at this years Percona Data Performance Conference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbmEDXq7es0

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In security-sensitive situations, performance can actually be a bug rather than a feature. This presentation covers timing attacks on the web, and demonstrates how modern performance-related web APIs can sometimes have a negative security impact.

Mathias Bynens — Front-End Performance: The Dark Side from Fronteers on Vimeo.

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This week an article on WIRED informed us that the average webpage is now the size of the computer game 'DOOM'.

Maciej Ceglowski gave an excellent talk on this subject at this years Web Directions conference. His keynote title "The website obesity crisis" is available on Vimeo.

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Added on 2016-04-28: newly provisioned Forge servers will now use http2 by default whenever you install an ssl certifcate.

Like mentioned in the post on how to upgrade PHP, I'm a big fan of Forge. By default sites provisioned by Forge use regular http. Let's learn how to enable http2.

The http2 protocol provides a lot of benefits over http. In short it'll make your website load much faster. If want to know how this protocol works under the hood watch this excellent video by Mattias Geniar or read this blogpost at Cloudflare. Here an interesting test by (again) Mattias that shows the potential speed improvements.

A prerequisite for using http2 is that you serve your website via an encrypted connection (note: this is not 100% true but virtually all major browsers won't support http2 via unencrypted connections). Thanks to LetsEncrypt you can get free ssl certificates. Watch this free video on Laracasts to learn how to install a LetsEncrypt certificate.

Support for http2 was introduced in Nginx 1.9.5. You can check the version number of your Nginx installation by running nginx -v. If you're on 1.9.5 or higher you're good. You just have to add http2 to a server block in the Nginx configuration:

server {
  listen 443 ssl http2;
  ...
}

The Chrome developer tools can be used to check if you're site is indeed using http2. The column "protocol" should display "h2".

Don't be overwhelmed with sadness if you're running something below Nginx 1.9.5. Upgrading is easy! Only three instructions are needed to upgrade to, at the time of this writing, Nginx 1.9.14:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nginx/development
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nginx

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At this year's FOSDEM Mattias Geniar explained what HTTP/2 has in store for developers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMm_qvCYwDk

Here are the slides used in his excellent talk:

https://speakerdeck.com/mattiasgeniar/2-for-php-developers

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Jens Segers made some benchmarks:

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Almost every email service has support for SMTP, and Laravel has an SMTP driver by default. So why even bother registering a custom email driver (aka API driver)?

First I thought it would make a difference in performance. So I did some quick tests on an Ubuntu Vagrant box.

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Thijs Feryn gave an overview at the Limburg PUG on various available tools and techniques to improve the performance of a website.

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Jack McDade, who designed the laravel.com and laracasts.com sites, shares some tips on how to make composer and npm much faster.

Whenever I run `composer install` or `npm install` I feel like an old man yelling at young punks to get off my lawn. Especially ever since `npm3`. I’ll save you the bitter diatribe and just get to the solution. But first, the problem.

Creating, distributing, maintaining, and consuming third-party dependencies was supposed to make us more productive and our lives easier. Instead, I feel like I spend more time waiting than coding.

So I dug and dug until I found solutions, as one does, and now I’m sharing them with you.

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Marko Lekić explains how he used Blackfire.io to solve a performance problem in one of his long running Laravel console commands.

The command worked, but very slowly. We left it working like that for some time until we finished critical stuff in the system and had time to go back and refactor some slow running code.

We ran the command with Blackfire.io and saw some interesting information when we ordered functions by percentage of exclusive time.

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Over at Laravel News Mike Bronner wrote some tips on how to achieve an A+ rating for your HTTPS website.

Let’s take a few extra minutes to optimize your server and help it perform faster and be more secure. In this tutorial we will look at using SSL session caching, HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), and Hypertext Transfer Protocol 2 (HTTP/2).

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The past few weeks we released several new packages: laravel-sluggable, laravel-robots-middleware, laravel-glide and pdf-to-text. These packages have in common that they all require PHP 7. Because there were several reactions and questions about this, I'd like to shed some light on that decision.

I expect that lots of developers will make the move to PHP 7 in the coming year. Sure there will always be legacy projects that'll never see an upgrade, but it makes no sense starting a greenfield project in PHP 5.X. The performance benefits are just too good. On the package side I expect that some widely used packages will make the jump as well. Jordi Boggiano has already announced that the next version of Monolog targets PHP 7. Also keep in mind that active support for PHP 5.x is coming to end this August (or at the latest December).

Not only developers will make a quick move to PHP 7. The speed benefit is quite interesting for hosting companies as well. A speedier PHP version means a machine can host more sites. There quite a few hosting companies that already made the jump and are offering PHP 7 support.

When we work on projects at Spatie we have to solve a lot of problems. When we solve a problem in way that the solution can be used in future projects, we create a package. So we create these packages primarily for our own future projects. We decided that from now on every greenfield project wil be a PHP 7 one. So it makes sense that our new packages would require PHP 7 as well. By doing so we can make use of the latest new features such as the scalar type hints, return types, anonymous classes and the null coalescing operator. At some point all our projects will leave PHP 5.6 behind. The earlier we won't have to deal with PHP 5.X code anymore the better.

I'm well aware that requiring PHP 7 will hurt the popularity of our packages in the short run. But popularity is not our main goal. People who are using the latest and greatest version of PHP can benefit from our work. And I hope others will be nudged a bit towards PHP 7 by our decision.

(EDIT: we won't change the requirements of our older packages. PHP 7 will only be required when we create a new major version.)

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Povilas Korop shared a neat trick at Laraveldaily.com today.

Let’s imagine the situation: you have a big database table (like 10 000 rows or bigger) and you need to run an update to one column. But you cannot run just SQL query – there is some PHP logic behind it. So foreach loop could potentially take forever or bump into a default 30-second script limit. Luckily, Laravel has a neat solution for it.

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In this post, the Netflix Performance Engineering team will show you the first 60 seconds of an optimized performance investigation at the command line, using standard Linux tools you should have available.

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For the League's CommonMark parser, we chose to prioritize extensibility over performance. This led to a decoupled object-oriented design which users can easily and customize. This has enabled others to build their own integrations, extensions, and other custom projects.

The library's performance is still decent - the end user probably can't differentiate between 42ms and 2ms (you should be caching your rendered Markdown anyway). Nevertheless, we still wanted to optimize our parser as much as possible without compromising our primary goals. This blog post explains how we used Blackfire to do just that.

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Another great article by Maxime Fabre:

In this article I'm going to dive into the pthreads extension (short for POSIX Threads). It has been around for a while (since 2012) but I feel like too many people forget it exists or assume it is going to be painful to use – mostly because the official documentation is rather slim about it.

Be sure to check out his previous post on Webpack and Blackfire too.

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HTTP/2 has a great feature called server push. It enables the server to send multiple responses in parallel for one request. In a blogpost on the Symfony Finland blog Jani Tarvainen demonstrates how to make use of server push with the Symfony Kernel.

$app->get('/images'), function () use ($app) {
    $images = array('/images/1.jpg','/images/2.jpg','/images/3.jpg');
    $response = new JsonResponse($images);
    foreach($images as $image){
        $response->headers->set('link','<' . $image . '>; rel=preload; as=image',false);
    }
    
    return $response;

Read the entire article for some more background info.

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The Retry library by Igor Wiedler has only 19 lines of code. Line 17 is a goto statement. In this issue on GitHub a user asks why Igor chose to use goto instead of resorting to recursion. Igor took the time to write out the reasoning behind that decision. It's a very interesting read on the PHP compiler and opcodes.

Why hello! Thank you for asking this most excellent question!

I have indeed considered alternatives to the goto. I have evaluated them to a great extent, and I am happy to present the results to you here.

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