Blackfire

Blackfire is a powerful PHP profiler that helps you optimize the performance of your code. It works by analyzing the performance of your PHP applications in real-time, providing detailed insights into where time is being spent and how you can improve efficiency.

At Dekkode, we have used Blackfire in a variety of projects and have consistently seen improvements in performance by a factor of 10 or more. It is an essential tool in our toolbox, and we highly recommend it to any developer looking to optimize the performance of their PHP applications.

One of the key advantages of Blackfire is that it is easy to use and integrate into your workflow. It is highly configurable, allowing you to customize the level of analysis that it performs, and it has a large set of rules that you can use to fine-tune its behavior.

Blackfire is a performance profiling tool for developers. It consist of four parts: An agent, that needs to run in your environment. A probe that depends on the language you want to profile. For PHP, the probe is a PHP extensions that needs to be loaded. The web interface, which runs on Blackfire servers and is responsible to take your profiling data and visualizes it. The last (and optional) part is a chrome extensions that triggers the profiling process. The probe collects data and sends it to the Blackfire agent. The Blackfire agent forwards this data to the Blackfire servers. This ensures that the performance impact of running blackfire in your environment is minimal. In fact, requests that are not profiled do not see a speed hit at all. The initial blackfire setup includes a few steps but the documentation is great and provides an interactive step-by-step guide for almost every configuration. However, it involves changing your production environments so DevOps needs to be included in the process.The pricing model is a a mix between pay-per-seat and additional features that can be booked. There is also a free plan that with limited functionality. This "Hack" plan already offers a lot of useful insights for anybody who wants to get started with PHP performance optimization.

In short, if you are looking to boost the performance of your PHP applications, Blackfire is an excellent choice. It is a powerful and widely used profiler that will help you identify and fix performance issues, ensuring that your code is as efficient and fast as possible.